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Under the moon the walls of the huts 
showed white beneath the heavy shadow 
of their thatched roofs. 





A BioGRAPHY oF AFRICA’s ELDEST DAUGHTER 


BY: 
BLAIR NILES 


‘‘ Haiti, fille ainée de l’Afrique, considére son 
histoire et sa civilisation comme la premiére 
page de la réhabilitation de sa race.” 


Bravuvais LESPINASSE. 


ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY 
ROBERT NILES, Jr. 


G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS 
NEW YORK LONDON 
The Rnickerbocker Press 


Copyright, 1926 
by 
Blair Niles 


_——— 


Illustrations copyrighted, 1925 
by 
Robert Niles, Jr. 





Second Impression, February, 1927 
Third Impression, February, 1929 





Made in the United States of America 


This Book 1s Dedicated 
to 
HENRY IZARD BACON RICE 
by 
The Author and the Illustrator 


el 


0 
es 


. 





CONTENTS 


THE MARINER’S HAITI 

A MONKEY ON A POST-CARD 

THE SIXTH DAY OF CREATION 

‘““THE BLACK ONE IS YOUR COCK”’ 
THE EMPEROR’S STATUE 

THE FLOWERED SHIRT 

SIR SPENSER AND THE CONGO BEANS 
THE SONG OF AFRICA 

INTO THE INTERIOR 


Four LIEUTENANTS AND THE PRISONER 
DRUMMED . ; 5 ; f I 


THE FIRST OF THE BLACKS 
PRIEST-HOUSE AND PALACE 
MAJESTY . ; : : : , 
FEAR ’ : ; : : : 
LAUGHTER : ; : : : 


AUTHORITIES CONSULTED . : i: b 


WHO 


PAGE 


J 


Wiad | 


avs Uy 
Aha p Ay MER 
PEASE YS ae 





ILLUSTRATIONS 


FACING 
PAGE 


Under the moon the walls of the huts showed white 
beneath the heavy shadow of their thatched 
roofs Frontispiece 


Little flickering lights supply features to the black 


faces of the market vendors . LS 
Wayside peace ; Ne ke, 
Travellers on the road : : Re Ries pr. 
At Bizoton) ))); ; i O4 
““Choucoune”’ . : St SOS 


In Petit Godve the sunshine is of so intense a 
clarity that the life surging in the streets is 
seen as purely objective : eer hee 


Night after night the church of early Spanish- 
American architecture stands on the east side 


of the plaza ; ; PRL 7O 
The prisoner who drummed ; \ : 1 180 
A peasant in the regal manner . Ter OkG 


Little huts closed to the sweet night air. . 246 


Vil 


viii Illustrations 


FACING 
PAGE 


Ruins . . . onlyruins . . . and yet of an in- 
definable majesty, as though they had once 
been the expression of some human dream . 266 
The gateway of the palace ; eo 
The great prow of the Citadel . BV 202 


Futile cannon waiting for orders that will never 
come . ; : ; Wan aO4 


Orange lichens enamel the grimly beautiful surface 
of the fortress walls. : Lat 


Black Haiti 





Black Haiti 


THE MARINER’S HAITI 


HE was a Sea-captain temporarily out of a com- 
mand, and filling in the interval by running the lift 
in a New York apartment house. But when he 
stood at the wheel he brought the sea into the noisy 
hub of the city; for his feet were from long habit 
braced well apart, and the sea flavored his speech. 
He could smell the snow before it fell. When he 
talked about smelling snow the four fire-proof sides 
of the elevator became the railing of a ship’s deck 
beyond which to the horizon surged the wintry 
waves of a northern ocean. While the man at the 
wheel of the lift remained what he was—a mariner 
detecting the odor of snow in the air. 

Often in the space of passing from the ground 
floor to the fifth, or from the fifth to the ground, we 
exchanged reminiscences of the strange little ports 
to which life had at one time or another taken us 

3 


4 Black Haiti 


both. And the captain’s memories reflected always 
the sort of thing that the shore says to the sailor. 
I fancied that he had not often in his sea-faring life 
passed so long a time on land, for he confided to 
me that human nature, as he observed it at the wheel 
of the lift, was a daily amazement to him. 

Now that we were friends he began to reason with 
me, and the time between the first and the fifth 
floors was extended at either end. He was so eager 
to convince me that I was making a mistake, and 
he was so certain that it was a mistake. And hav- 
ing come to know his ruddy honesty, I was puzzled 
at finding in him prejudice. Then one day, linger- 
ing at the street door, he explained. 

‘“When I was in Haiti, last March,” he said, 
‘‘a big nigger came up to me. ‘If I could get you 
alone,’ he told me, ‘I’d cut your heart out and 
eat it.’ 

‘‘And,” the captain added, ‘‘what’s more, he 
meant it, too.” 

Months later I was to find on the dusty shelves 
of Madame Viard’s little shop in Port-au-Prince, a 
book in which twenty-five years ago Hannibal Price 
wrung his hands over what he called the incurable 
levity of his countrymen. He held that their 
inability to refrain from playing up a situation was 
responsible for much of the misinformation about 
Haiti. 


The Mariner’s Haiti ms 


And now that I know Haiti I can see how irresist- 
ible a target for Haitian raillery the big blond cap- 
tain had been as in his white uniform he walked the 
sun-flooded streets of Port-au-Prince, whose soft 
flower-scented air had never known the smell of 
snow. I could hear the laughter of the “big nig- 
ger’’ who would ‘‘cut out his heart and eat it.” 
And there was bitterness as well as mockery in the 
laughter. 

But my captain with the blue Nordic eyes took 
the matter of eating hearts quite seriously. He 
remained convinced that in Haiti fearful things 
might happen to the hearts of white men. He 
was credulous because it is so easy to believe what 
has been countless times said; to believe what many 
before you have credited, for repetition greases the 
ways of belief. 

Then, as though he would protect us, at least in 
matters of navigation, he had insisted upon lending 
his copy of the mariners’ West Indies Pilot. 


That was how it happened that, sitting cross- 
legged on the forward deck I was able to follow the 
technique of our approach, up to the final dropping 
of our anchor in the harbor of Cape Haitian. Thus 
I followed each manoeuvre although I could not 
understand a word of the full-throated Dutch com- 
mands shouted from the bridge. Down on the 


6 Black Haiti 


forward deck those commands seemed to come from 
somewhere far up in the night as though Dutch 
were the language of the sky, while the responses 
from the sailor in the bow might have been wafted 
back to us from Orion, or from the bright Dog-star 
at his striding heels. For toward Orion and Sirius 
we moved over satin-smooth black water. 

So the Haiti of our approach happened to be for 
me the mariner’s Haiti, as he perceives it from the 
ship, before some ‘‘big nigger’’ ashore has threat- 
ened his heart. 

This Haiti stands up out of the sea—the highest 
peak of that submerged mountain range whose sum- 
mits appear as the islands of the Greater Antilles. 
The depth of Mona Passage which separates Haiti 
from Porto Rico exceeds any yet sounded in the 
Atlantic. To the strange ocean creatures living on 
the floor of this Brownson Deep, Haiti is higher 
than Mount Everest. It is Mount Haiti, rising 
from the waters with its summit enveloped in air, 
as the mountain crests of man are often wrapped in 
cloud. 

The mariner knows how few are its lights; knows 
its currents and its reefs and its anchorages; where 
supplies may be had, and whether or not there is 
water. He knows the tides and the channels. He 
is familiar with guiding landmarks and has a know- 
ledge of exports and imports. 


The Mariner’s Haiti 7 


To the navigator these things are Haiti; these and 
sometimes a walk ashore and a chance encounter 
with ‘‘natives.”’ 


Toward this Haiti of the mariner we moved with 
just the softest silver whisper of sound . . . the 
swish of phosphorescent water breaking against the 
ship’s bow. Only an occasional order from the 
bridge cut into the night. And always we steered 
toward that brightest of the stars. 

Then suddenly there were two sharp little toots 
from the lookout in the bow. A shooting star fell, 
as though at the trumpet signal it had descended 
to become the light-house which just at that moment 
came blinking up over the horizon. 

The West Indies Pilot had prophesied that seven- 
teen miles off Picolet we might expect to see the 
“‘occulting white light of the Point.” But it omitted 
to say that the appearance of the light would be 
announced by little trumpet toots in the bow; or 
that by way of additional celebration a shooting 
star would fall. Ignoring such stage directions it 
had concerned itself with cautions and commands. 
For example, from the moment of the Light’s appear- 
ing the mariner should give the shore a berth of at 
least a mile and a half, until ‘‘said Light should 
bear from 160° to 220°,’’ when he should ‘‘stand 
in toward the Light, avoiding the Outer Shoals, the 


8 Black Haiti 


Shoal of Le Grand Mouton, the Mardi Gras Reef, 
and the Shoal of La Trompense.”’ 

With all this in mind, bells and whistles directed, 
while sailors peering into the dark proclaimed guid- 
ing and warning buoys. 

Slowly and cautiously we thus entered into the 
moon-bright peace of the silent harbor. 

The anchor chain rattled down. The ship backed. 
More chain went over. And we came quietly to 
rest. 

On shore a deep-toned bell tolled the twelve 
strokes of midnight. Somewhere to the left a 
Haitian cock crowed. A far-off Haitian dog barked. 
From the hills which rise without preamble behind 
lights scattered low along the water-front, there 
came the faint odor of wood-smoke. 

That was all. 


A MOoNnxKEY ON A Post CARD 


PERCHED on the edge of the narrow sidewalk a 
small negro boy read aloud to himself. He read in 
soft, half-whispered sing-song, spelling out the words 
syllable by syllable as they were printed on the 
thumbed page. 

He was a tiny black boy, with a battered straw 
hat several sizes too small, and blue overalls many 
times too big. He could not possibly have seen 
more than seven rainy seasons fall upon the thirsty 
streets of Cape Haitian. Yet these were the words 
he read in his breathless rhythm: 


Ca-lam-i-te’ 
Mo-ral-i-te’ 
Ti-mid-i-te’ 
pé-gur-i-te’ 


Enchanted by this little person who, squatting on 
the ledge of sidewalk, oblivious of passers-by, read 
to himself such serious words, I cried out to the 
photographer that I must have him. 

Of course the focussing collected the usual inter- 

9 


10 Black Haiti 


ested crowd. The infant reader was charmed to 
pose, and the picture was just about to be snapped, 
when there broke through the gathering an elderly 
mulatto man. In the moment before he spoke I 
saw that he was slightly built, as well as short of 
stature, that he had a yellow wrinkled face sparsely 
fringed with a dark beard, that he wore a shabby 
shiny black suit, and that there was a broad band of 
dusty crepe about the crown of his black straw hat. 

This little mourning mulatto vehemently pro- 
claimed that the photograph should not be. 

“‘T . . . IT oppose myself!’’ he exclaimed. 

“But why?” 

‘Because I will not have it!’’ And a storm pos- 
sessed the saffron body in the dingy garments. “‘I 
will not have the child put on a post card and labelled 
a ‘monkey’! That is why you want the picture. 
And I will not have it!”’ 

‘‘Ah no! It was because he was so small and so 
studious, and the words so long—”’ 

“That is only your bluff.” And the little man 
shook a sorrowful head. But he would allow the 
boy to accept some sweets. 

Hiding from the tempest behind the door of a 
shop, only the startled whites of the child’s eyes had 
showed round in the shadow; now an ivory smile 
added itself to the eyes which rolled in the black 
little face. 


A Monkey on a Post Card II 


The mulatto went on his way. The crowd re- 
solved itself into individuals; into tiny donkeys and 
diminutive horses, into lean yellow dogs and toddling 
children; into turbaned women who balanced heavy 
baskets and trays on their heads; peasants and shop- 
keepers, unshod and shod, negroes and mulattoes. 
The individuals, having ceased thus to be a closely 
packed crowd, became a stream which, because of 
the narrowness of sidewalks, flowed in the middle 
of the street. 

The child ran off in sticky bliss, but what would 
such an incident do to a plastic human ego? When 
the candy was forgotten what would remain in the 
memory? He had been so innocently responsive, 
so eager to be photographed, as syllable by syllable 
he squatted over the mastery of long words. We 
had been friends until full of resentment the mulatto 
had forbidden a photograph. The boy had been 
puzzled and a little frightened. Then surprisingly 
there had been candy. 

But the idea of race animosity had been planted; 
it was as though the incident were a charade rep- 
resenting ‘‘the whole” of that word ‘‘ca-lam-i-té’’. 
The child would remember what they’d said about 
being labelled ‘‘a monkey on a post card.” And 
remembering, he might some day accost a great 
blond captain walking ashore. It might amuse 
him to threaten such a captain with cannibalism. 


12 Black Haiti 


We had left the ship lying in the harbor where at 
midnight our anchor chain had slipped down into 
silvered black water. In the morning little boats 
had come out to where we lay. From the official 
boat there had fluttered the red and blue flag of 
Haiti. It was the French flag with the white elim- 
inated. Negro men had been singing as the boat 
came to us over the dazzling bay. Their deep 
vibrant voices had imparted so different an emo- 
tional quality to the familiar music that it was some 
minutes before I had identified it as the song of 
Liberty—the Marseillaise. JI had been watching the 
newly risen sun whiten, like a searchlight, the low, 
vermilion-roofed houses of the Cape, and while I 
watched, wondering as one always wonders in the 
moments of expectancy before setting foot upon a 
land at last materialized but not yet experienced. 

Then I all at once knew the song for the Marseil- 
laise. I never again heard it in Haiti, and it is 
difficult now entirely to believe that a voyager upon 
a first morning in the island should hear negro 
voices in the song which is as much the birth-song 
of that Republic ‘as it is of the Republic of France; 
the French Revolution being so extraordinarily 
interwoven with Haitian history. 

Nevertheless, it cannot be fancy, for here it is in 
notes jotted down later in the day: waving flag; 
red and blue; negro men singing the Marseillaise; 


A Monkey on a Post Card 13 


an entry about the ship’s bells; a description of the 
hills where little drifts of smoke mark the peasants’ 
preparation of the soil for planting, with far-off, on 
the highest of them all, hazy and mysterious, the 
Citadel of King Christophe. 

All these things being facts, I cannot doubt the 
Marseillaise; nor the grey motor boat which brought 
out to us a pink “‘white,’”’ wearing the uniform of 
the United States Marine Corps. Although, drama- 
tizing as it does the most recent chapter of the sensa- 
tional story of Haiti, that too partakes of the qual- 
ity of Art, rather than of fact. 

Because the symbolism of Art demanded that 
there should have been black men singing of dear 
Liberty, while in the breeze quivered a flag of red 
and blue; because it demanded also that there should 
have been a military white in a motor boat, it was 
of course, extraordinary that all should thus actu- 
ally have happened. 


And now by the grey motor boat which had 
brought us ashore, we were to return to the ship. 

Over imports and exports we scrambled into the 
boat; our feet registering that Haiti imports flour, 
and dried fish packed in wooden boxes, while the 
great slippery sacks of coffee were bound for Europe. 
Barges would take this coffee out to the little Dutch 
ship on which we travelled, and then we would con- 


14 Black Haiti 


tinue our coastwise voyage around the northern 
peninsula and into the bay of Gonave to the cap- 
ital at Port-au-Prince. 


‘‘Did you visit the pineapple plantation?’’ ques- 
tioned our fellow passengers as we sat together on 
deck watching the course of our ship as she sought 
the channel between those shoals which in the dark- 
ness of night she had so cautiously skirted. 

No, we hadn’t seen the pineapple plantation. 

‘Nor the hospital?”’ 

AN Ody 

‘‘Nor the house where Napoleon’s brother-in-law 
died ?’”’ 

‘Nor the American Club?”’ 

We apologized that we would be returning later 
to Cape Haitian. 

Pineapple plantations and clubs... of what 
value are these things beside one living echo of the 
streets! You might inspect a thousand hospitals, 
visit a thousand houses where some personage was 
said to have died; yet the very existence of such 
places might become a blur, while there would 
remain forever branded upon your heart that fig- 
ure of a little man, shaken like some withered yellow 
leaf which had been scorched in the searing flame of 
humiliation. 


THE SIxtH DAY OF CREATION 


THE world of bats and frogs had waked, for 
already the tips of the cocoanut palm fronds had 
begun to dance in the night breeze, and in a moment 
the pale boles of the royal palms surrounding the 
pension would no longer stand out against the fast 
darkening sky. 

Within, young Marine Corps officers, Legation 
aides and attachés were getting into starched white 
uniforms. In the semi-privacy of a tropical house, 
the walls and doors of whose rooms are slatted, it 
is impossible to escape the details of dressings, un- 
dressings and ablutions, even were there not so per- 
vasive a frankness in these matters. 

But notwithstanding the fact of a pension where 
exotic whites of the American Occupation dressed 
for the Saturday night festivities of a foreign popu- 
lation, and where Marine Corps slang floated through 
the slats of wall and door, one has only to look out 
upon the cocoanut palm dancing in the dark, to 
realize the ephemeral quality of political situations, 


and the eternal significance of the pulsing heart of life. 
15 


16 Black Haiti 


The cocoanut palm is the crystallization of the 
tropic dance, as the gnarled pine is the sturdy dance 
of the north wind, cast into tree-shape. 

The dance of the cocoanut palm begins in the 
tips of its fronds as they droop languidly over the 
clustered nuts. With the first faint stirring of the 
air the rhythm trips along the leaves, until, when 
the measure of the breeze has quickened, all the 
fronds of the great crown are tossing; adding a 
music of their own-—a soft rustle which keeps 
time with the breeze. Then when the cadence 
strengthens into wind, the long slender bole joins 
the dance; swaying and undulating from its leafy ° 
crown, down all the fifty feet of its height to the 
earth from which it springs. And now the fronds 
move in wild abandon. Even the heavier, coarser . 
leaves of a nearby royal palm reflect the rhythm, 
though its bole, straight and rigid, never forgets to 
be regal. 

But it is only the cocoanut palm that from its 
very roots to the top of its high, graceful head ex- 
presses the sensuous undulating dance of life under 
tropic stars. 


We rode out into that night where wakeful bats 
and frogs gave voice to what was in their hearts, 
and where in innumerable darks, cocoanut palms 
have danced until with the passing of time, they 


The Sixth Day of Creation 17 


have taken on the very shape of the dance. We 
rode through narrow lane-like streets, passing be- 
tween high walls enclosing the grounds of villas. 
Hung with pink flowering coral vine and purple 
bougainvillea, the houses glowed like great painted 
lanterns. ‘Their lights flowing from wide verandas, 
through open French windows, and escaping in nar- 
row slits from jalousies, cast an unearthly sort of 
illumination over vine and shrub and flower. Oc- 
casionally motors dashed noisily out between the 
tall gateposts and disappeared like lightning flashes 
down the dim streets. 

Then there were no more villas and we glided 
through the deserted business section, coming sud- 
denly upon the street of the night market where, 
against a background of deep unlit arches, tiny kero- 
sene torches flamed over low stalls, never more than 
Standard-Oil-tin height from the ground. 

The graceful curve of the high arches is filled 
with darkness; the figures of kerchief-turbaned 
women preside over vague trays where something 
seems to be exposed for sale; more figures come and 
go, like the uncertain shadows of people; the shadows 
sometimes pause and buy from the trays. The little 
flickering lights supply features to the black faces 
of the market vendors, and show their turbans in 
subdued purples and reds and yellows. All is softly 
veiled in the enveloping dark. Laughter and 


18 Black Haiti 


speech, youth and age, all are hazy; ever so slightly 
out of focus. Even the flutter of the torches is a 
blur of light, punctuating here and there the night. 

Such was the swift picture as we moved through 
the street, and on into the country, past the hangars 
on one side, and the modern sugar refinery on the 
other. The passing of the refinery is like the sud- 
den going off of a rocket; we ran into the glare of its 
lights, for being the grinding season, the refinery 
was working twenty-four hours a day; and then in a 
moment we were alone with the night. 


The moon had risen, and that rural Haiti, into 
which we had passed so quickly from the pension 
where an alien race donned its white uniforms, 
seemed now to float in silver light. 

Our motor connected one dark little village with 
another dark little village. Under the moon the 
walls of the huts showed white beneath the heavy 
shadow of their thatched roofs. Save for the moon, 
such dark little villages! 

In one, the embers of a dying, outdoor supper-fire 
faintly glowed. In another, some one walked about 
carrying atorch. The life-sized Calvary in a third, 
had only the moon to illumine its perpetuation of 
sorrow. In a fourth, men and women slept under 
an open-sided thatched shed; sleeping on the ground 
among their donkeys and their sheep. 





Little flickering lights supply features to 
the black faces of the market vendors. 


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The Sixth Day of Creation 19 


Occasionally along the road there were other trav- 
ellers by night; looming up a vague ghostly size, 
perched on ghost donkeys with ghostly turbans 
wound about their heads, and often ghostly hats 
atop the turbans. And the regal carriage of these 
peasant women was magnified in the exaggeration 
of the pale light. 

Now and then we passed a graveyard where the 
last resting places of those who had perhaps in life 
just carelessly thrown themselves down to sleep 
among their sheep and their donkeys were in 
death marked by impressive rectangles of brick or 
stone. 

For the tomb is one of the white man’s customs 
to which the Haitian negro has wholeheartedly 
taken. In writing of Africa, Mungo Park, Réné 
Maran and Llewelyn Powys comment upon the 
absence of monuments to the dead. 

But throughout Haiti, on lonely mountain tops, 
on the banks of obscure little rivers, everywhere, 
tombs honor those who have gone. ‘The primitive 
mind, seeking always symbols in which to express 
its emotions, seized upon the idea of tombs; favor- 
ing especially those in which there are little niches 
where an offering of food might be left, or where a 
candle might be burned. 

So, as we rode out into the night, slumbering vil- 
lage alternated with still graveyard. 


20 Black Haiti 


But always there were cocoanut paims, solitary 
or in groups; and always they trembled and swayed. 


Then come the first sounds of the drum; soft and 
penetrative . . . the voice of the fambour, so loved 
by peasant Haiti. 

We stop the car, and with our hands cupped 
behind our ears, we slowly revolve our heads in an 
effort to pick up that sound which comes from 
everywhere and yet from nowhere in particular. 

The rhythm is soft and insistent; as pervasive and 
as intangible as the night. It comes calling in little 
staccato phrases: 

One—two—three... Four... five; One—two— 
three. . . Four. . . five; incessantly repeated, with 
always the deep, heavy emphasis on the fourth beat, 
with the second a little syncopated grace-note, just 
a breath between the one and the three. 

The tambour calls, and one is eager to follow. But 
where? 

Down a narrow, sandy, cactus-bordered road to 
the right? No...when we stop and cup our 
ears, the rhythmic beat has gone. And there is 
only the silk rustle of palm fronds; that, and the 
untiring choir of frogs in the wayside ditch. 

Back again then, on the main road, to roll along 
under the sparkle of stars, bright even in the lumi- 
nous moon-glow, and seeming close enough to 


The Sixth Day of Creation 21 


be the stars of the tree-tops, rather than of the 
sky. 

This is dream country, like the country of Kip- 
ling’s ‘‘Brushwood Boy.’”’ For here night after 
night we are to follow the drums. The contour and 
the landmarks remain mapped in my memory, 
undisturbed by any later daylight inspection. There 
is the village where sheep lie white in the moonlight; 
the village where only the mournful Calvary seems 
awake; there are little grave-yards whose dim night 
outlines are more vivid than their clarity by day; 
there are the convolutions of some one never-to-be- 
forgotten palm; there are fireflies in the foliage over 
the ditch where frogs sing; and there are the pale 
roads down which we often so vainly pursue the 
drums. In front of us there are sometimes eyes 
glowing in our reflected light; like tiny headlights 
are these eyes of straying goat or dog. 

As your everyday and rather obvious self is sup- 
plemented by your mysterious dream-self, so there 
are two Haitis. There is the Haiti that goes to 
market, that pounds clothes upon the stones of the 
river, that harvests the cane and the coffee, that, 
having had revolutions and too many presidents, 
now has an advisory Nordic Occupation. But the 
dream Haiti has nothing to do with all this. It is 
the Haiti of drum and of dance. 

Driving through this dream country, mapped in 


22 Black Haiti 


moon and starlight, we cup our hands behind our 
ears and listen... . 

One—two—three... Four... five.... Com- 
ing from everywhere and nowhere. 

We try the turn to the right, leading off from the 
road to Lake Saumatre. All at once the drums are 
loud in our ears. And there are women’s voices 
singing in chorus. From far off the cadence of their 
song has the rhythm of cock-crow; as though that 
had been the original theme upon which have 
been built variations, subtle amplification, surprising 
harmonies; all multiplied and heard from far-off; 
heard with the ears of one’s dream mind, with that 
glamour with which one remembers sensations long 
past. 

When one is near enough to hear the chorus, it is 
easy to locate the dance, for the voices lack the con- 
fusing, ventriloquial quality of the drums. So thatit 
is at last human voices and not the drums which 
guide us. 


Then. ..it is no longer the year 1925. It is 
the sixth day of creation; the day when ‘‘male and 
female created He them.’ And under the high 
moon, we watch the creatures of creation dance. 
... They dance to the long Voodoo drum, the 
voice of which so profoundly stirs them that its use 
has been made illegal. 


The Sixth Day of Creation 23 


On the floor of the Bornean jungle the Argus 
pheasant clears his dancing place, and there per- 
forms the strange, quivering, hypnotic dance of 
the feather eyes, which is to win for him his mate. 
And no superior pheasants legislate against him or 
shudder at the obscenity of the masculine glory of 
his plumage. 

But there is a type of educated Haitian who, 
seared by the contempt of a white world, would cast 
off all race inheritance. Such Haitians ignore the 
great gifts which their race might make to a drab 
and waiting world; gifts of rhythm and of imagery 
and of joy. 

They will have none of all this. They desire— 
hopelessly—to demonstrate only Anglo-Saxon vir- 
tues; hopelessly, because race virtues are acquired 
through the slow process of evolution, and may not 
be put on at will. It is, for example, not possible 
overnight to assume the very imperfect degree of 
self government to which we have attained. 

In the glitter of those virtues which are not yet 
theirs, their own great racial gifts are despised. 

Inoculated with the germ of law-making, they will 
legislate out of existence the race traditions and emo- 
tions and individuality which have brought down 
upon them much unthinking contempt. 

Therefore Voodoo temples are to be raided, Voo- 
doo drums confiscated. It has even been suggested 


24 Black Haiti 


that there be a law to prohibit the peasant from 
entering Port-au-Prince unless he wear shoes. But 
Port-au-Prince being dependent for its food supply 
on the thousands of bare-foot and sandalled market 
women who bring down to the city the produce 
of the hills, that law had to go by the board. But 
dancing and drums and picturesque traditions . 
those surely they could legislate away. 


Yet still men and women dance to the tambour. 
“When the cat’s away,” their proverb runs, “‘the 
rats dance the calinda.”’ And there can never be 
enough cats to prohibit those who dance to the One 


—two—three. .. Four. ..five of the big 
drum; to the little drum which has all the time a pri- 
vate One... two—o—o—o.... three. . . four 


syncopation of its own; to the tambourine and the 
flute; to the calabashes filled with pebbles and shaken 
until they rattle like the dry pods of the tchia-tchia 
tree when the wind is strong. While, high and 
strangely sweet, the provocative chorus of the women 
alternates with the deep response of the men; and 
the clapping of hands accentuates the beat. 

Thus they are dancing when we stealthily join the 
assemblage. But we need no such precautions, for 
our presence is scarcely observed. We become 
absorbed by the crowd, assimilated, blotted out, 
as it were. We are not important to men and women 


The Sixth Day of Creation 25 


dancing the oldest dance in the world, to the deep, 
soft One—two—three... Four...five of a 
great drum. 

This love dance is primarily of the body, although 
some steps are taken with the feet. It begins with 
the arms raised in the familiar gesture with which 
Haitian peasants approach the altar—with which 
they offer themselves to God. Whoever of the clap- 
ping singing company is moved to dance raises thus 
the arms; the upper arms at right angles to the body, 
and the lower arm at right angles to the upper, with 
palms up and facing forward. 

With this gesture of surrender a man approaches a 
woman, or a woman a man. The rhythm of cala- 
bash and tambour little by little possesses their 
bodies, expressing itself in difficult and intricate 
movements which require infinite muscular flexi- 
bility. 

To the chorus of alternate male and female voices, 
and to the high sweet treble of the flute men and 
women dance under the moon: surrender and recoil, 
offer and hesitate, until the culmination of a final 
embrace in which, with figure almost stationary, 
their bodies still move to the ecstasy of the dance. 

While, dark against the spangled sky, the cocoa- 
nut palms tremble to the rhythm of the night breeze. 
And a few miles away, in Port-au-Prince, in the 
electric blaze of their modern clubs, aristocratic 


26 Black Haiti 


Haiti dances with the sophistication of Paris or 
New York. 


I am familiar with the measured posturing dances 
of Japan, of India, Java, and Burma. I have 
watched the head-hunting dance of the Dyaks of 
Borneo. That was savage enough, primitive enough; 
its dancer in a sleeveless coat of bear skin, a cap of 
the skin of the zebra cat from which floated long 
hornbill feathers, with a painted shield, and at his 
side a great knife in a carved vermilion sheath from 
which fluttered locks of human hair. There was the 
beat of tom-toms and the wailing music of reeds, and 
I sat under a circle of dried human heads. 

It was a pantomimic dance, a representation of 
the head hunt; beginning with the moment of 
stealthy creeping through dense jungle; crouching, 
listening, peering; seeking always the hidden prey. 
With the imagined discovery of the prey there’d 
been quickened music and the drawing of the knife 
from its sheath. The dancer had circled on one foot, 
the other drawn up above the knee. He had spun 
round and round and round.... With crashing 
blow of knife upon shield he had sunk low, leaning 
so far back that the long feathers swept the floor. 
And then suddenly risen, to circle again, like some 
huge bird with outstretched wings, circling about its 
cowering victim... . 


The Sixth Day of Creation 27 


But, savage as it was, that too had been in a way 
sophisticated; it was dramatization, and to imper- 
sonate is more sophisticated than to express surg- 
ing emotion, such as we watched under the Haitian 
moon. That went further back than the hunt; 
back to the beginning when man danced that he 
might be ‘‘fruitful and replenish the earth.” It 
was the dance of the sixth day of creation: a strange 
and unforgettable sight, sweeping back the tide of 
life to the beginning of us all. 

To a student of man, the witnessing of it was 
almost as miraculous an experience as it would be 
for a palaeontologist to come suddenly upon a 
dinosaur walking abroad; not needing to be recon- 
structed from fossil bones and then vivified by the 
imagination, but walking in the very flesh. 

I saw much dancing in Haiti. Every Saturday 
night we would slip out into the country to follow 
the drums wherever they might lead. But never 
again did we see the dance of creation, which Have- 
lock Ellis calls the ‘“‘primitive dance of sexual 
selection,” the ‘‘novitiate for love’’; the ‘‘simple, 
personal, passionate dance; older by far than 
man.”’ 

‘Simple, personal and passionate dancing’’— 
that was what we saw on our first night in 
Haiti. 

Of the other dances, many were elaborate, but all 


28 Black Haiti 


were solo, with no physical contact between the 
participants. Sometimes children of ten or twelve 
years old performed in costume; in scarlet tights 
spangled with gilt and with huge red paper head- 
dresses. The crowd carried them about on their 
shoulders from house to house, where to drum and 
tchia-ichia, to song and clapping the little creatures 
would dance until I feared they would drop from 
exhaustion. 


We often mingled with such a crowd, leaving 
our motor to come cautiously after; although they 
were as oblivious of the car as of us. Some tall, 
powerfully built negress, carrying a little kerosene 
torch would lead the way, and lead the song, for 
they sang as they danced along the white winding 
road. 

It all lives in my memory, as clear as the contour 
of that dream country where it took place. I see 
the women in their sleeveless calico dresses, very 
short as to length and cut comfortably low in the 
neck. Under the dress there is a loose white che- 
mise. Sometimes they wear sandals, but generally 
feet as well as legs are bare. Almost always there 
is a brilliant handkerchief turban, and gilt hoop ear- 
rings; often a white bone bracelet above the elbow, 
and a necklace of coral beads. But, in the diffused 
luminosity of the night, there is not light enough to 


The Sixth Day of Creation 29 


throw into relief their features. Where there should 
be features there is only—night. 

And every woman of them all—the young who 
dance and the old who followed the cavalcade with 
trays of refreshments on their heads—all were eco- 
nomically independent. That fact has given to the 
peasant women of Haiti a sort of queenliness, an 
unconscious arrogance of freedom. She sits on her 
donkey as upon a throne. Her turban is knotted 
with the dignity of a crown. Her long stride when 
walking is the very rhythm of freedom. She dances 
with abandon, and her morals are as much her own 
affair as before there was any apple from forbidden 
tree. 

I see it all, dancing figures with vague faces of 
night; short light-colored skirts swinging with the 
dancing hips; men shown in masses of dark and 
light, like camouflaged men; here a pair of long 
white cotton trousers connecting with a dark shirt 
almost invisible, perhaps a light shirt merging into 
the shadow of dark trousers. I hear the beat of 
drums and the cadenced rattle of calabashes and 
voices . . . like the crow of cocks set to music 
and echoing from some distant world. 


Soon there will be no longer on this aging planet 
any such innocent dance of creation. It will have: 
become modified, not by legislation, but because of 


30 Black Haiti 


the gradual evolution of peasant and primitive 
peoples. Yet it cannot wholly vanish, but must 
somehow reincarnate; since, like the dance of the 
palm tree in the wind, it is part of the eternal rhythm 
of life. 


“Tue BLAcK ONE Is Your Cock” 


‘““THE black one is your cock.’ The bird we were 
to stake was thus summarily introduced by our escort 
who had taken it for granted that we were incap- 
able of selecting a cock for ourselves. However, 
he seemed a fine bird to eyes unaccustomed to ap- 
praising the fighting qualities of roosters. Anyone 
might be proud to put money on a creature whose 
plumage was so glossy a black and whose ruff was 
gorgeous enough to have been borrowed from a 
golden pheasant. While his opponent was nothing 
to look at; just a skinny-necked reddish rooster. 

It was after close inspection of the many fowls 
waiting to enter the lists that our companion had 
made the announcement; speaking the English of 
his Jamaican father; an intonation running up the 
scale, with the stress all upon the final word, “‘The- 
black-one-is-your-cock!”’ 

Also it was an English limited in fluency and 
vocabulary, for the man was Haitian-born and of a 
Haitian mother, with Creole French his natural 
medium of expression. But such as his English was, 

31 


32 Black Haiti 


we were grateful, for it might in crises prove a staff, 
upon the sudden collapse of our frequently totter- 
ing Creole. 


The day was a crowing Haitian Sabbath with 
the cocks assembled for combat, saluting and chal- 
lenging each other and all creation. Poor silly 
crowing things calling upon the world to come 
and see how they would fight, even to the death, 
for no reason whatever that concerned themselves. 

From one end to the other of the country; along 
the southern peninsula, and the northern peninsula; 
in the Department of the West, which forms the 
arch of that horseshoe of land which is the Republic 
of Haiti, everywhere the cocks thus announce the 
conflict. Their echoing crows spread the con- 
tagion of excitement, as though, in some mysteri- 
ous way, they know from the moment of the sun’s 
rising that this is cocksday, and as though the 
knowledge of its danger and its thrill has set all 
their wings to flapping and all their throats to 
crowing. 

It is as if some rooster, waking early in Jacmel, on 
the Caribbean-washed shore of the south, had 
sounded the first call to the fray, and as if that 
crow had quivered with such prescience as to im- 
part its prophetic quality to its nearest neighbor who, 
tugging impatiently at his restraining cord, had 


“The Black One Is Your Cock” 33 


taken up and passed on the shrill cry from house 
to house in the town of Jacmel, and from Jacmel to 
the villages along the twisting river, and thence 
from settlement to settlement over the range of 
hills and down to the capital at Port-au-Prince. 

In Port-au-Prince there are registered something 
like a hundred and twenty-five thousand inhabi- 
tants. There are not, it is true, quite a rooster per 
capita, but so many are there that in the Port the 
battle clarion becomes a reverberant chorus; and 
the Port a distributing center of concentrated ex- 
citement, from which the emotion of the day is 
again relayed by town and village, village and town, 
through L’Arcahaie to Saint Marc, Saint Marc to 
Gonaives, Gonaives to Ennery and so on over the 
divide and down to the northern coast where the 
great Atlantic beats itself into foam against the 
coral reefs. 

Thus does the cry seem to travel with the day, up 
across the island and back again, transmitted from 
cock to cock, cocks communicating their news in 
the same manner as has been the way of the Haitian 
peasant since long before there was in the world any 
Morse or Marconi. 

The rich in Haiti may now use these modern mir- 
acles, but for the peasant they do not yet exist and 
still it is on the vibrations of the human voice that 
tidings are carried from field of cotton or sugar- 


34 Black Haiti 


cane, through the rustling banners of the bananas, 
up to where coffee blooms and down again to cane 
and cotton. 

‘“There pass six whites,” a deep negro voice may 
intone, ‘‘six whites carrying guns. They go north 
over the shore road to the Cape.”’ 

The hills will give back the words until they pass 
from field to field, and many an American Marine 
has been amazed to find that news of his coming 
has preceded him, so that breakfast is unexpectedly 
waiting him here and a bed is ready there. 

So on Sundays, all over Haiti, the cocks pro- 
claim their duels. 

Of course masses are sung in every’ village large 
enough to support a priest, and once a month in 
villages able to command but the fourth part of a 
priest. But it is not the singing of masses, or the 
wafted incense that makes the Haitian Sunday of 
memory. It is the high crowing from near and 
far, shrilly rending the clear hot sunshine. 

For six days in the week these gamecocks lead a 
pampered, fettered existence, tied safely by the leg 
under whatever tropical tree happens to provide 
their masters with shade they are fed with the best 
while some small child brandishes a stick, to shoo 
off common poultry who must scratch for their own 
living. 

Then on Sunday comes the day of their testing, 


“The Black One Is Your Cock” 35 


the day of their high adventure. And crowing, 
they fling their challenge. 


The heat was heavy in the crowd about the cock- 
pit. The sun forced its way through the great 
dried palm fronds which, laid one upon another, 
formed a flat roof over the circular arena. It came 
through in slender fingers of light, which lay upon 
the earth floor, separated one from the other by the 
pinnated shadow of the leaves. Only uprights of 
bamboo supported the leafy roof; the sides, but for 
a two-foot high enclosure, were open to the crowd 
which after the game begins must leave the arena 
to the cocks and to official personages in charge of 
the fight. 

Now, before the game was called, the spectators 
swarmed in the pit itself, examining the birds and 
endlessly discussing how each would place his money, 
while to heap confusion upon confusion the owners 
were going about, cock under arm, comparing 
points, seeking suitable adversaries for their con- 
testants, raising objections, suspiciously inspecting 
spurs to see that they were not poisoned, and feath- 
ers to make certain that they had not been larded 
to turn aside attacking beaks. 

It was out of this bedlam of bettors and book- 
makers, and owners that our friend had announced 
the black one to be our cock. 


36 Black Haiti 


And still new combatants were arriving, not car- 
ried any old way, upside down, suspended by feet or 
wing, as on week days the vulgar among fowls 
travel to market; not thus, but held tenderly and 
close against the body of owner or stage manager, 
held carefully with head pointing forward. Occa- 
sionally a cock arrived on horseback, and then its 
owner was a person of importance; frequently an 
elderly man with a head-handkerchief twisted like a 
Mohammedan turban, and with a Panama hat to 
top it off. 

And each fresh arrival increased the tumult and 
added a new note to the deafening challenging 
crows. 

In Haiti on Sundays the peasant woman sits under 
the pleasant shade of a bread-fruit tree while some 
relative or friend combs and dresses her hair. The 
only women who obey the cocks’ summons are 
those who gather to do a bit of trading, bringing 
their low rattan chairs and sitting with their usual 
wares spread out before them on wicker or wooden 
trays. They are there to sell tobacco and rum, 
kola and cookies and plantains, and to carry on a 
bantering talk among themselves. ‘They are obvi- 
ously unconcerned with sport. 

I admit that I too had come more to see the crowd 
than from any enthusiasm about the fight. I was 
therefore not impatient at the interminable delays. 


“The Black One Is Your Cock” 37 


I’d made friends with a boy next to me who pas- 
sionately urged us not to bet “‘on the inside... . 
Play for yourself. ..always for yourself... 
never inside the ring.” 

And there was the intoxicated gendarme reading 
a Dumas novel. He was a slender mulatto fellow, 
quite drunk, and the only drunk gendarme I hap- 
pened to seein Haiti. The Dumas novel, he boasted, 
had been written by his cousin; a cousin some- 
what removed, but perhaps a cousin for all that, 
since the father of the great Dumas pére had been 
born in Haiti, the son of a French Marquis and the 
negress, Marie Cessette Dumas. 

Would she have been, I wondered, like the slim 
black girl in the saucy red and yellow turban, who 
stood among the chattering women, smoking non- 
chalantly her pipe and occasionally tossing turban 
and brass earrings as she threw some sort of merry 
sally at a passing man. She, too, could well have 
been arrogant, for she’d never been repudiated and 
her name had gone down the line of genius, though 
she’d founded it outside the law and darkened its 
blood with her African inheritance. 

“You are a quadroon, Monsieur Dumas?’’ runs 
the story of an interview with the great man. 

“Lam; sir... 

‘‘And your father?”’ 

“Was a mulatto.” 


38 Black Haiti 


‘‘And your grandfather?” 

‘‘A negro.” Dumas did not trouble to explain 
that it was his grandmother, Marie Dumas, who had 
infused the negro blood. 

‘‘And may I enquire what your great-grandfather 
was?”’ 

“‘An ape, sir! An ape! My pedigree commences 
where yours terminates.” 

Would the Marie Cessette Dumas of more than a 
hundred years ago have laughed at such a story, © 
laughed and tossed her turban, or would she have 
been puzzled to understand why the subject was 
worthy of mention, there being in those days so 
many children in Haiti whose fathers were French 
and whose mothers were African? 


No, it was not at all stupid waiting for the game 
to begin, although our escort was in quite a fever 
of impatience. He was not for literature or great- 
ness. To him the cocks were the thing, and of 
course especially the black one. 

Yet it was only a little while before that he had 
been telling me his sorrows. Now in the bare an- 
ticipation of the sport they seemed entirely forgot- 
ten; lost sight of in masculine capacity for instant 
impersonal detachment, that amazing quality of 
detachment, much to be emulated by women who as 
a class have not yet learned to lay aside grief as 


“The Black One Is Your Cock” 39 


one removes a garment, which has perhaps later 
to be resumed, but which can for the moment at 
least be dropped. 

Standing with me in the little thatch and mud hut 
which was his home, our escort’s troubles had seemed 
quite to fill the cabin. 

Things were very sad with him, he told me. His 
first wife had died. He’d been away at the time, 
fighting . . . but his candidate for the Presidency 
had lost. And then he’d had, of course, to take 
to the ‘‘bush.” In order to save his life he’d gone 
up into the hills. It was always wise to give a new 
President time to settle down into office and to 
forget just who had taken up arms to elect his rival. 
Then, when it had seemed safe, our friend had 
returned, to find that on that very day his wife had 
died as the result of a rumor that he’d been killed. 
He’d found her dead in the bed, and with the dram- 
atic power of the negro, he made me see her lying 
there the stark victim of love and of the military 
form of electing Presidents. 

There had been the usual second wife to mitigate 
the loss of the first, but she had ‘‘done some bad 
thing” to him. Now she could live no longer in 
that place, but had gone to Anse-le-Veau. 

I urged making friends, but my arguments, based 
on certain principles of psychology, were not com- 
prehended. 


40 Black Haiti 


No, he would never make friends. ‘‘If your wife 
hov’ good fomily, you overlook much. If she hov’ 
bad fomily, no.’’ God, he concluded, would send 
him another. Meanwhile he must “‘suffer a little.” 
He must pay a woman forty cents a month to wash 
and cook for him. But that could not last. He had 
faith in God. 

Now, to my astonishment, the mere assembling 
for the weekly cockfight was enough to banish all 
thought of his domestic tragedies. Up to the last 
moment he was in the arena, leaving only when a 
man walked about the ring pounding the earth with 
a plank as the final signal that all spectators must 
find places outside, only those directly connected 
with the combatants being allowed to remain. 

The plank was then used to close the entrance. 
Within the ring, all but the two cocks and their 
human seconds, squatted close to the bamboo rail- 
ing. Outside we, the spectators, were packed in 
a perspiring circle. The confusion died down to a 
buzz of excitement. 

The first round was settled by one of the com- 
batant’s running precipitately from the ring. The 
mulatto boy who had urged us to ‘‘play for our- 
selves’? shook his head and murmured that it was 
a ‘‘mystére,”’ that something was wrong, or the bird 
would not have run so soon. 

In peasant Haiti the unexpected... prema- 


“The Black One Is Your Cock” 41 


ture death for example, or a rooster’s running too 
soon from the arena...always suggests a 
‘‘mystére.”’ “‘Some voodoo business”’ is immedi- 
ately suspected. 

The possibility of this was discussed while the 
managers—the carizadors—of the next combatants 
groomed their birds for battle: giving a last edge to 
the sharpening of spurs, licking the wings, neck and 
beak. The sign of the cross was then scratched on 
the floor of the pit and a pinch of dust from the 
sign rubbed on the cocks’ bills. The tethering 
cords had been released from their legs. All was 
ready. 

The men placed the birds on the ground, advan- 
cing and drawing them back until they showed 
voluntary pugnacity, when the men withdrew. 
The battle was on and the black one was our 
Cocke: 

Up to this moment I had remained interested 
chiefly in the crowd; in the women hovering on the 
outskirts and keen only about commerce and strictly 
personal matters. I was amused at the reading of 
Dumas ata cock-pit, and fascinated by the abandon 
of a red and yellow turbaned girl who personified for 
me Marie, the mother of Dumas. While fragments of 
the life drama of our escort made me marvel at his 
passionate absorption in a cockfight. 

“If the cock run three times,’’ he was whispering, 


42 Black Haiti 


‘“‘he lose. If he run once all ’round ring an’ don’ 
fight no more. . . he lose.”’ 


I listen to the explanations, looking on indiffer- 
ently at two roosters, absurdly advancing and 
retreating, pecking and parrying, whirling and 
attacking, while a circle of grown-up men shout their 
excitement. 

In the arena the two owners, who are also the 
cariadors, follow every movement of their birds: 
following with short shuffling steps, tensely con- 
centrated and incessantly urging, scolding and en- 
couraging. 

The men both wear shoes, a fact which lifts them 
out of the purely peasant class. The owner of the 
black cock is appropriately black himself, with a 
round flat face, very glossy, as though it had been 
oiled. Inthe black disc of his face only one feature 
impresses itself; an immensely long upper lip which 
has a trick of expressing the man’s every emotion. 

The other owner is smaller, slighter, with a sparse 
mustache and dull black skin, like the black of the 
hat-pins and shoe buttons, and leather, which our 
civilization dulls to indicate a mourning heart. 

Like giants looking on at a pigmy conflict, these 
men follow their birds around the 25-foot diameter 
ring; moving with those odd dust-raising little steps 
and saying over and over again the same things. 


“The Black One Is Your Cock” 43 


The sunlight sifts through the palm roof and 
sketches shadow leaves on the dirt floor; a still pat- 
tern that does not quiver in the breathless heat 
but is as motionless as light and shadow on a painted 
canvas. 

In their attack and retreat the roosters move 
slowly about the ring, and as they shift, the men 
squatting inside the ring surge out of their way. 
Only the mosaic of leaf and sunlight lies motionless 
on the floor. 

A roar goes up from the close-encircling black 
humanity which encloses the circumference of the 
ring, filling the open sides, as though a dark curtain 
had been dropped from the roof, shutting out the 
light so that the stage is lit only by the sun filter- 
ing through overhead. White eyeballs and here and 
there a flash of teeth pierce the curtain, which 
must surely seem actually rent by our two white 
faces. 

Back of this human curtain the waiting cocks 
must have continued to crow, butas I re-live the 
scene I don’t remember them. Yet without doubt 
they must have crowed, as countless times all over 
Haiti, I have heard them demand their turn at the 
game. But after the game has been called nothing 
has existence outside the still circle of sunlight and 
leaf-shadow. 

There the fight never lets up. The skinny- 


A4 Black Haiti 


necked rooster is ferocious, tireless, and I discover 
that he has a wild shrewd eye. To escape the cruel 
bombardment of his spurs the black cock is re- 
peatedly driven to duck his bleeding head under 
the cover of his opponent’s wing. And then there 
goes up a hoarse clamor from the backers of that 
ugly tawny rooster. But over and over the black 
cock recovers to rush valiantly with outstretched 
neck and lowered wings. 

“VaValuiViveals 

“ Bravol’, 

The birds leap as though jerked from above by 
marionette strings. They peck and parry in the 
air. But for the black cock the buoyancy, the verve, 
has little by little gone out of those leaps. 

His sponsor has pulled the long upper lip down 
over the lower. He has taken the cord which teth- 
ered his cock and passed it under the sole of his 
right foot. Holding the two ends in his hands he 
pulls the cord back and forth. The black cock’s 
sponsor is plainly in an agony of apprehension. For 
the black cock’s beak hangs open, and he is gasping. 
Now the owner squats beside him. ‘‘Fool! fool!”’ 
he implores ‘‘attack! Why don’t you attack, fool?” 

But there seems no more attack left in the blood- 
streaked bedraggled creature, once so lustrous a 
black and gold. No attack, but Lord, what a 
defense! Run? That is not in his reckoning. He 


“The Black One Is Your Cock” 45 


may stand forever gasping under the merciless pecks 
delivered without fatigue and with a deadly pre- 
cision, but run? 

He sinks exhausted. 

HW hOunTOuY attack ly 

The increasing heat is dust-laden, heavy with the 
smell of feathers wet with blood. 

Somewhere in the ring the other man is praising 
the skinny-neck, telling him how fine a bird he is, 
and how certain is his victory. The backers of 
the winner run round the circle flourishing bills of 
paper money. They will raise their bets. Who 
will take them up? 

“Attack, foul’? urges the man with the lip, 
beseeching. 

And so close are primitive people to the animals 
with which they literally share their lives and their 
homes, that both men speak as though without 
question they were understood. 

Then, amazingly, the black cock does rally, rise 
and stagger toward his opponent. He staggers and 
strikes out. . 

The owner has risen. He points toward the roof, 
as if by that upward gesture, to raise the flagging 
strength of his bird. He even hurls a jest at the 
faithless crowd who have made the odds two to one 
against him. 

Once more in dusty, breathless, blood-scented 


46 Black Haiti 


heat, the attack and the weary defense begin. Once 
more with that little restless shuffling of their heavy 
black shoes, the owners follow the shifting struggle 
as it moves back and forth over the pattern of sun 
and shadow. Once more there is anguished exhorta- 
tion; once more the deep rumble of applauding cries 
leave the resonant throats of negro men. 

Then, as by mutual consent, for neither bird has 
called a halt by turning tail, the owners pick up 
their fowls to administer badly needed first aid. 
They suck the blood from their heads and spit it on 
the ground, staining the black and light mosaic 
with blotches of dull red. They smooth the feath- 
ers and lick the backs from head to tail. They fill 
their mouths with water from a tin cup, and, as a 
Chinaman sprays his laundry, they spray the 
_ wounded combs of their birds. 

The owner of the reddish rooster is holding him 
high, flirting up his tail feathers and walking round 
the ring to exhibit to the crowd how much of life 
and spirit yet remain. As for the black cock, he 
lies utterly limp in his master’s hands. It would 
be useless to exhibit that listless panting body. 
Surely he will not fight again! 

But again when the birds are replaced on the 
floor of the pit, the black cock is ready. His attacks 
are feeble and spaced far apart. Each time he sinks 
it seems as though he will not rally. 


“The Black One Is Your Cock” 47 


The owner no longer urges him, no longer be- 
seeches ‘‘Oh, fool! Attack!’ He has accepted the 
outcome. With his upper lip drawn completely out 
of sight, he leans against the center post, awaiting 
the end. Even the noisy spectators have become 
suddenly tensely quiet. The-waiting roosters must, 
I suppose, have crowed, but I cannot remember 
that in those final moments of battle there was any 
sound whatever beyond the flutter of cocks’ wings. 

The marionette cords have ceased to pull tne black 
cock up in attacking leaps. He lunges blindly along 
the ground, sinks panting, takes the everlasting pun- 
ishment, and then rallies todo it allover again. But 
he does not run. 

There is no end, until at last he can no longer rise 
from his final swoon of exhaustion. 


It was almost noon when we came out again upon 
the road. 

Money was changing hands in the ring where the 
victorious danced and embraced and slapped each 
other on the back. New combatants were enter- 
ing in the arms of their owners. Fresh bets were 
being negotiated. And above it all sounded the 
lusty crow of roosters... . 

It was almost noon and the struggle had lasted 
an hour. 

After the tense heat of the cock-pit the air blew 


48 Black Haiti 


freshly across the bay. And the life of the road 
seemed strange and new, as though we had been a 
long time away from it, as though the hour of the 
battle had measured itself in months rather than 
in minutes. 

The reviving air blew freshly and familiarity slowly 
returned to life and to the road. 

In spite of its being Sunday there was an occa- 
sional woman with a load of market stuff on her 
head. There was a busy preoccupied hen marshal- 
ling her brood, a hen with loose middle-aged feathers 
blown about by the breeze. Frequently she stopped 
to scratch for food, clucking softly that here was a 
nice morsel, and there another. And on the wind, 
which was so cool after crossing the bay, there came 
the distant and yet more distant crow of chickens, 
grown up to be warriors. 

So the life of the road trickled slowly back to real- 
ity, as at the end of the day, when the fighting was 
finished, memories might return, to those men who 
had gathered about all the cock-pits of Haiti; to 
our escort, for example, who might then remember 
the wife dead in her bed, and the wife who, not being 
of ‘good fomily,”’ could not be forgiven, and the 
forty cents that must be paid out monthly for wash- 
ing and cooking; God being slow in sending another. 





Wayside peace. 


et ek 
. dy ;. 
: 7m ” a \ 


Aes 
« 


aha a 
5 Ae) : Ny rey 
( Aira 
a 


Mh, iy 
ee 





THE EMPEROR’S STATUE 


I 


It begins by being only a statue, the erect figure of 
aman wearing a great plumed hat. He has drawn 
his sword from its scabbard and holds it forever 
uplifted in his right hand. Standing thus, this 
dark iron man looks across the square, beyond the 
white dazzle of the new Government Palace, beyond 
the new administrative buildings, across to the 
unforgettable blue beauty of the bay. 

The statue dominates the scene, and the life of 
Port-au-Prince revolves about it. In our constant 
passing and re-passing the lonely threatening fig- 
ure becomes bit by bit alive. 

There was a day when, in the defence of the 
Créte-a-Pierrot, those brilliant plumes were the 
enemy’s target; for they marked the position of 
Jean Jacques Dessalines: and the person of that 
ferocious black leader would have been of inesti- 
mable value to the French fighting to retain the pos- 
session of their richest dependency. So the plumes 

49 


50 Black Haiti 


of the statue came to life, expressing Dessalines’ 
reckless love of the gorgeous. Then upon another 
day the sword is real; no longer of iron, but steel; 
steel covered with blood. And with a shudder, I 
turn away from history, to the life which circles 
around the statue. 


If on a Saturday morning you follow the market 
women as they come down from the hills you will 
continue beyand the statue until you find yourself 
in the great Cathedral Plaza. There, side by side, 
stand the new and the old cathedrals. Port-au- 
Prince is proud of its new cathedral, the shadow of 
whose twin spires falls across the throng swarming 
in the market place. But in the old cathedral the 
modern Port is uninterested. For six days in the 
week its doors are closed and locked, only on Satur- 
days are they opened. They are opened for the 
market women who have come down from the 
surrounding hills. These country people have ven- 
eration and love for the old building, clinging to its 
tradition, as for so long their race has clung to the 
inherited memories of African deities. The great 
new cathedral, vaulted and airy with light streaming 
through rose and indigo windows, has for them no 
legend of miracles performed. There is nothing 
to lure them in to worship and to supplicate. There- 
fore, on market day the priests unlock the doors of 


The Emperor's Statue 51 


the old church. And following the market women 
I enter. 

After the blaze of sunlight in the plaza it is very 
dark inside; dark and very quiet. But as the pupils 
of my eyes, contracted by the strong glare of the 
market place, slowly widen in adjustment to the 
dim old church, I begin to take in details. 

I see that the low ceiling is pale blue, studded all 
over with gilt stars; that this sagging, faded sky is 
upheld by blue wooden columns and that just in- 
side the chancel is a life-sized figure of Christ. He 
is wearing a red silk gown and carrying on his bowed 
back a heavy wooden cross. Looking about, I 
note that paintings hang on the walls; many of 
them askew, as though shaken out of place by some 
long ago earthquake, and left to hang forevermore 
at these intoxicated angles. Peering into the shad- 
ows, I discover piles of broken chairs, old picture 
frames, boxes and barrels, all buried in dust; as if the 
film of a hundred years lay upon them; and nothing 
had stirred since Dessalines had ceased to be Emperor. 

In the left aisle there still remain rows of cane- 
seated chairs, from many of which the cane has 
been rotted or worn away. I sit in one of these 
chairs and watch the negroes who worship at the 
chancel. From back of the altar there comes the 
sound of priests chanting to the accompaniment of 
some small and invisible organ. 


52 Black Haiti 


There is no glass in the windows and the light 
by which I have examined the old church and by 
which I now watch the coming and going of the 
devout, strays in through the slats of dilapidated 
wooden shutters. The peasants move softly over 
the worn brick floor to the chancel railing which 
disintegrates with age and climate and with the 
attack of generations of irreligious insects. When 
the poor kneel before the buff and gilt altar, I 
remember that last night it rained; for the saffron 
soles of their feet I see to be caked with mud; red 
or grey mud according to the section of hill country 
from which they have come. 

In the droning quiet I realize that the religion of 
the Haitian peasants is as simple, as personal and 
as passionate as is their dancing. In just such chant- 
ing peace I have sat many hours in the cathedrals 
of Ecuador and of Colombia, watching the reverent 
mute adoration of the South American Indians. 
Their adoration is inarticulate as they themselves 
are inarticulate. In the cold dawns of the Andean 
plateau they flock shivering to mass, they kneel 
long on stone floors, their eyes fixed by the splendor 
of Catholicism. They are motionless while the 
minutes pass into hours; only their lips move, fer- 
vently repeating the phrases which they have been 
taught, or their hands at intervals make the sign of 
the cross. But their own souls indicate no gesture. 


The Emperor’s Statue 53 


But in Haiti there is spontaneous expression. I 
have seen how negro women adore; I have watched 
them pass black bony hands over the body of the 
crucified Christ. With a touching tenderness they 
stroke the face and the head, the naked white wax 
arms and legs. With clumsy kisses which resound 
in the stillness they kiss the hands and feet. And 
upon leaving, they bow to the very flagging of the 
floor. 


When I wander about the old cathedral, I pause 
before a portrait labelled, ‘‘Louzs, Rot de France.” 
It is the profile of a kneeling Louis; with a pointed 
brown beard and long flowing brown hair. The 
market women cross themselves before him; but 
nothing in all the cathedral is so popular as is the 
painting of Saint Jacques le Majeur; a dashing saint 
on prancing horseback. 

To this picture the peasants burn great numbers 
of the native candles which they call bougies. Out- 
side in the sun you may see them manufactur- 
ing these little tapers which are of birthday-cake 
size. 

All over Haiti bougies are put about anywhere 
that fancy suggests; stuck with a bit of their own 
wax against walls, on floors, on the backs of chairs; 
in huts or in cathedrals. In the tropical warmth 
the candles remain pliant, taking as they burn the 


54. Black Haiti 


shape of the breeze, much as the cocoanut palms 
are curled and fluted by the wind. 

Before Saint Jacques le Majeur many bougies 
flicker from the uneven surface of the floor, or 
from wall and column. 

Among the women supplicating the Saint, there 
is a tall negress of the Amazon type; a woman of 
massive frame and with burnished black skin. She 
has lit her candle, dropped a bit of its wax on the 
floor, to which she then firmly attaches the candle. 
Now she stands erect against one of the blue sup- 
porting columns. The light through a shuttered 
window glints on the gilt hoops of her ear rings. 
With something of defiance in her pose she stands 
as she argues and reasons with the Saint. 

This woman’s forebears were of course slaves, but 
back of that, far away in Guinea, surely her ances- 
tors commanded. For her gestures are the gestures 
of command, and she is imperious before her saint. 
She leaves him no doubt that she expects results. 
Of her swift undertone of Creole I can catch only 
that she has entered into some sort of “‘commerce”’ 
in which it is necessary that she succeed, and suc- 
ceed ‘toute suite, toute suite!”’ 

It must have been such a woman who was mother 
to Dessalines; for Dessalines too would have given 
arrogant orders to a saint. 

She reasons long before the picture. It is almost 


The Emperor’s Statue 55 


as though she peremptorily disposes of objections 
which the Saint dares to advance. While she expos- 
tulates the group shifts; women leaving and others 
arriving. Many reach high to touch lovingly the 
frame of the picture. They pat the wall or scrawl 
upon it indigo crosses. In such numbers have these 
things happened that the frame of the picture is worn, 
and the wall is marked with cross and finger-print. 

Haiti brings the senses into religion. Haiti must 
feel and see and express. Religion becomes pas- 
sionate and simple and personal. 


Outside in the market five thousand women and 
children and men pack the square, and in little clear- 
ings in the crowd there are spread on the ground 
the products of the Island. It is an exhibition of 
native produce in which are represented all the 
grains and the fruits; the vegetables; the primitive 
rattan chairs and baskets, and canes which are made 
in the little settlements of the hills; the hand-man- 
ufactured dishes and trays of wood; and the gourds 
which may take the place of wooden dishes or of 
the more luxurious granite-ware utensils. 

The effect, looking down at it from the steps of 
the old cathedral, is of a surging sea, blue with the 
indigo of the women’s dresses; a moving blue ex- 
panse upon which float the gay turbans, like bril- 
liant painted fish come to the surface. 


56 Black Haiti 


There is a ceaseless movement in the market; 
excited gesticulation of buying and selling, of affec- 
tionate greeting and of vituperation. ‘‘There are 
those who come to sell’”’ laughs the proverb, ‘‘those 
who come to buy, and others who come to steal.” 

On Saturdays all the intense vitality of Haiti 
seems centered in its markets. There are shouts of 
*“Passez! Passez!’’ as new comers enter, their bur- 
dens on their heads, or as customers leave with their 
purchases similarly balanced. ‘‘Passez! Passez!”’ 

Many of the wares offered for sale have come 
miles thus on the heads of women who have often 
walked all night. We of the efficient north deplore 
this waste of energy; we wonder that no more eco- 
nomical method of transportation has been devised. 
As though it were not perfectly obvious that the 
peasant desires nothing better, has never consid- 
ered improvement. Why, the fun of it all is the 
coming to market and the sport of bargaining in the 
lively square! It is with reluctance that a woman 
will sell her produce on the way, though it might 
save her many miles. 

This vivid life of the market overflows into the 
streets which bound the plaza. There, on all sides 
the emphatic bells of peddlers ring, and there 
coachmen driving the most disreputable hacks on 
the planet, let the wooden handles of their whips 
rattle against the revolving spokes of the wheels, 


The Emperor’s Statue 57 


in the futile hope that the noise will clear the way 
for their dejected horses. That failing, he shouts 
‘“*Passez, ma chéere! Passez!’’ Or, in threat, he 
may raise his whip, crying in a great voice, 
*‘Madame!”’ 


II 


In the hot noons the Champ-de-Mars is deserted 
and Dessalines is left to remember. . 

Remembering the massacre he must be bewildered 
at the numbers of white men who have just rolled 
by in motors on their way home to lunch. For had 
he not himself directed the murder of those French 
whites who had dared to remain in Haiti after the 
defeated Rochambeau had sailed home to Europe? 
That white massacre was his ghastly celebration of 
the final severance of his troubled island from 
France. Even his iron statue must recollect the 
bitter joy it gave him! 

The statue must remember how Dessalines had 
had his soldiers seek out the whites, searching every- 
where; in the cane-fields, under beds, under the 
thatch of roofs, in the branches of trees, even in 
the great ovens. It must remember how he had 
had these victims driven to a little distance from 
the town, and how, striking three times on his snuff: 
box he had given the signal. 


58 Black Haiti 


During his struggle to free the slaves of Haiti, 
Toussaint Louverture used to say regretfully that 
you could not make an omelet without breaking 
the eggs. But Dessalines gloried in the breaking of 
eggs. His heart was flooded with the hot dark 
waters of revenge. So it was that he signalled 
joyfully on his snuff-box. 

Near Petite Riviére Dessalines had what he de- 
lighted to call his palace. Its ruins still stand hot 
in the sun, and of course, compared to a Haitian 
hut it was really a palace. You can wander now 
from roofless room to roofless room speculating upon 
which was the one where Claire Heureuse, his wife, 
interceded for the life of the French naturalist, 
Descourtils. He had been brought before Dessa- 
lines as an exception, as one whom it might be well 
to spare. The man had a knowledge of medicine, 
and Dessalines sometimes spared physicians, priests 
and artisans. But upon that day he had been in no 
mood to spare any whites. The man must die, 
like the rest. The house was over-run with black 
officers, all intoxicated with blood. ‘‘Each drop 
of white blood shed,” they said, ‘‘gives new life to 
the tree of liberty.’”’ And so Descourtils, doctor or 
no doctor, should perish. It was not a day for 
clemency. 

Then Claire Heureuse fell at the feet of her angry 
husband. Mercy!...And was not the man a 


The Emperor’s Statue 59 


physician? He might be useful... .Mercy!... 
Thus Descourtils lived to write the three volumes 
of his “ Voyage d’un Naturaliste.”’ 

The incident is but one isolated moment of that 
orgy of massacre in which there were murdered the 
French whites who, trusting to the honor of Dessa- 
lines, had remained on the island. It is but one 
moment, separated from the rest; standing out in 
the way of dominant moments, isolated for some 
reason not often clear; in this case perhaps because 
of the vivid memory of the compassionate woman 
whose name was Happy Light. Of the other acts 
of massacre, of the blood spilled in Leogane, in 
Petit Godve, in Port-au-Prince, in Saint Marc, 
Gonaives and the Cape, the scenes had been much 
the same; blood and cries, beseeching women, 
bayonets and blood: a horrible business altogether; 
not to be too much dwelt upon, nor forever held 
against a slave people who had seen the living bod- 
ies of their brothers fed to famished blood- 
hounds. . 

They had had terror for the future, as well as 
vengeance in their hearts. Dessalines and his ultra- 
revolutionist party would have had all the pros- 
perous coast towns deserted and destroyed; would 
have had the people establish new cities in the fast- 
nesses of the hills, and had the hills strongly forti- 
fied. They would, in their bitterness and their fear, 


60 Black Haiti 


have severed for all time any communication with 
whites. After each day of massacre they had 
danced, Dessalines thrusting his left hand into the 
breast of his waistcoat and pirouetting nimbly on 
one foot. With what gay triumph they had danced! 
Dessalines most proficient of them all! 


NBA 


It is by way of one sentence in an old book picked 
up at Madame Viard’s that I enter into the charac- 
ter of this dreadful Dessalines. The sentence reads 
that his ‘“‘hatred of the Colonial French was im- 
placable’’ and that ‘‘it became more envenomed 
each time he considered the fustigations with which 
his body was covered.” I puzzle over that 
strange word—fustigations; never before having 
happened upon this thing which so envenomed 
Dessalines. 

In Port-au-Prince I go often to Madame Viard’s 
book shop. Indeed it requires much going to obtain 
the things I seek. The shop is a tiny place; yet 
there is nothing else in Haiti that can really be 
called a book shop. 

In two glass cases are a few paper-covered works 
of modern French fiction and plays; among them 
one or two by Haitians. Glass enclosed shelves 
contain an assortment of school books, fraternizing 


The Emperor's Statue - 61 


ironically with volumes by Anatole France, Pierre 
Loti and Lafcadio Hearn. 

But the books which lure me to Madame Viard’s 
are on the three or four dusty shelves over the door. 
You must use a step-ladder to reach them, and you 
will find that they smother in dust, that they have 
been occasionally sampled by rats and by various 
inquisitive tropical insects. You will find that 
sometimes a binding has disappeared and that 
pages are frequently musty and yellowed. 

Chez this Madame Viard’s I learn much. I take 
home my tattered treasures, to return the next 
day demanding some author recommended to me 
by one of my shabby books. 

No, it is not there. 

Can it be procured? 

The old woman who is Madame Viard sits in a 
chair by the open door, looking out into the street, 
at the battered hacks which pass or which stand like 
spiders in the shade, waiting to ensnare some fly 
of a customer; looking too upon the swift entrance 
and exit of the motors which somehow she doesn’t 
remember to have seen in her youth; looking also 
upon the whites grown strangely so much more 
numerous; looking out and smiling the vague smile 
of age. 

She ventures no opinions, no answer to my ques- 
tioning. The middle-aged daughter—or perhaps 


62 Black Haiti 


she is a daughter-in-law—will ask Monsieur Viard. 
The plump granddaughter dusts the books I buy 
and supplies a basin of water, like a finger bowl, to 
be used after purchases are made. The son, who 
has been to the States and knows a little English, 
makes conversation. But he does not know whether 
the books I want can be had. So I wait while 
pigeons walk about, and a white kitten, over-dressed 
for the climate, plays languidly under the glass 
cases. 

The old Monsieur Viard enters and is appealed to. 
Iam eager. I want passionately this or that. For 
days, even for weeks, he is cold, this tall thin old 
man with the sensitive, aristocratic, finely chis- 
elled Caucasian features, the brown skin and the 
long grey beard; a Tagore of a man, or a prophet 
walked just that minute out of the Old Testament. 
A sad distant old man who expresses no interest, 
gives no hope, but who will see. If I return another 
day perhaps he may have what I want. 

In the interval I often meet a Haitian who urges 
that I must by all means have some particular book; 
a book truly Haitian. For all this seeking of mine 
is for the things that Haitians have written. I 
want to know what they have thought and felt in 
the years of their dramatic existence as Haitians. 

The aged Monsieur Viard will see; he cannot 
promise. | 


The Emperor’s Statue 63 


Occasionally upon my return he produces the 
desired volume. Again he reports failure to secure 
it. 

At Madame Viard’s I begin to see that life is 
pretty hopeless for a Haitian author. At his own 
expense he publishes a limited number of copies of 
his work, and even more limited is his possible buy- 
ing public. He makes some presentations. I do 
not know that there has ever been such a thing as a 
re-print. Thus ina very short time both supply and 
demand are exhausted, and the rare purchaser must 
forage for a possible second-hand copy. 

So it is that always Monsieur Viard will see; 
always he cannot promise. 

But with the repetition of visits he begins to 
smile a little and to question this customer so 
ardently desiring the works of Haitian writers. 

“Why?” he one day inquires. ‘“‘Why, Madame?” 

‘‘Oh, I want to see Haiti as the Haitians see it. 
I want to know how they have felt.” ... 

My immense and profoundly sympathetic curi- 
osity about human beings, about all who have 
shared the sweet and terrible experience of living, 
attempts to pour itself out to Monsieur Viard; a 
difficult enough matter in English but wholly impos- 
sible for me in French. 

But the old man who has lived long and felt much, 
smiles into his mouse-grey beard. He will see... . 


64 Black Haiti 


So visit by visit I gather the books and pamphlets 
that are to show me how Haitians have estimated 
their own sensational history; books written while 
men yet lived who could remember the events and 
the heroes. I unearth little intimate anecdotes; 
snatches of talk echo from the living past. And 
these things are more important than those dates of 
battles, than the statistics of the numbers of men 
slain, which barren facts find so ready an exit from 
all imaginative minds. 


Histories composed at long range by authors far 
removed in color, in environment and inheritance, 
declare Dessalines to have been a monster of 
treachery and cruelty. Possibly. But the thing 
of compelling interest is not the mere fact of mon- 
strosity, but the solution of Why is a Monster a 
Monster, or a Saint a Saint? 

And from the books which I patiently pursue at 
Madame Viard’s I learn that Dessalines could 
never contemplate the fustigations upon his body 
without being at once possessed by blind red 
rage. 

I learn that Dessalines had come into the world 
with so fierce and proud a nature that he could never 
compromise with slavery, as did Toussaint Louver- 
ture, never even to the degree of adaptation achieved 
by Christophe. Because of that defiance there had 


The Emperor’s Statue 65 


been the floggings which had marked his body— 
the body of the proud Dessalines—so that he could 
never look upon it without an overwhelming fury 
of resentment. But there had been the hills, and 
brigands in the hills, to which such as Dessalines 
eventually escaped. 

And then—six weeks distant across the water— 
there was a French Revolution. The forty thousand 
white colonists of Haiti were jubilant. They wanted 
a freer hand in the island than France had ever 
permitted. They chafed under haughtily corrupt 
European officials sent out to govern them. They 
had wealth but they knew well that it might have 
been far greater. They resented the tyrannical 
rule which forced them to send all their products 
to France and which compelled them to buy only 
from her at whatever price she chose to exact. 
It was a serious handicap to be restricted to trade 
only by way of the inadequate Merchant Marine of 
France. ‘These were the colonists’ grievances, and 
they were triumphant at the prospect of a new 
régime. 

But the whites themselves were not united; there 
was bitterness between one caste and another. The 
European born scorned the Creole. The rich whites, 
many of whom were cruel and voluptuous, scorned 
the rabble of crooks whose reputations had forced 
them out of Europe. 


66 Black Haiti 


Not only did these whites of Haiti observe the 
French Revolution. There were twenty-seven thou- 
sand ‘‘free people of color,” many of whom had been 
educated in France. For in the beginning the 
color line had been loose. Many of the mulattoes 
had had but one slave ancestor, their fathers hav- 
ing freed them at birth; freeing often their mothers 
as well. They had amassed wealth and themselves 
owned slaves. Their increase in importance and 
in numbers aroused resentment in the later Colo- 
nists. The line was tightened. No one of color 
might hold office, or enter the professions. They 
must be segregated in the churches, the theaters and 
the inns. 

In the declaration of the “‘rights of man” they 
saw their opportunity. 

Only the five hundred thousand slaves of Haiti 
were in the beginning oblivious to what that Revolu- 
tion might mean. Their yearly importation from 
Africa continued, for the same severity of toil, the 
Same nervous strain of slavery which had entirely 
exterminated the aboriginal Indian population, had 
a deterrent effect upon the reproductivity of the 
blacks. They did not breed readily in captivity. 

Then to the amazement of the ‘“‘free people of 
color’”’ their propaganda against the white colonists 
had an astonishing result. It led to the forming 
in Paris of the Society of the Friends of Blacks! 


The Emperor’s Statue 67 


That was something that neither the white nor the 
colored had bargained for. 

Very slowly the news trickled through to the bewil- 
dered slaves, to be repeated by them to the brigands 
in those hills to which such as Dessalines escaped. 

All men, the news said, were to be free to use body 
as well as spirit in any sort of activity they chose, 
provided it caused no wrong to another. That 
meant, they gradually came to realize, that there 
was to be no more slavery. A great hope 
dawned. . . 

But that shining hope was soon crushed by the 
indignant Colonists, and then it was that revolting 
slaves rose up in Haiti, crying ‘‘Lzberié! Liberté!” 
even as the boatmen had sung of liberty upon the 
morning of our arrival in Cape Haiti. But to lib- 
erty the slaves added the cry of “‘Vengeance!”’ 

And Dessalines came down from the hills. 


Revolt, intrigue, treachery, the wheel, blood- 
hounds, massacre, bravery, and despair; alliance 
with Spaniards; invasion and expulsion of the British; 
war between blacks and mulattoes; these events 
crowded the turbulent years. 

And then what was left of Napoleon’s army sailed 
away. Dessalines had accomplished the independ- 
ence of Haiti and became its Governor for life. 

Now perhaps he might forget to brood upon fus- 


68 Black Haiti 


tigations. He might dance, for always he adored 
to dance, and was a famous carabinier. And there 
were women—Dessalines had many women. 

To such a man power was the one thing which 
soothed the humiliation of his soul, the one thing 
which made it bearable for him to gaze upon the 
enduring marks of his slavery—and he had power. 

But there was Napoleon . . . Napoleon had 
from the beginning obsessed the imagination of 
Haitian slaves. Thirsty egos craved to drink of 
the intoxicating cup of power. All knew that 
Napoleon had risen from nothing. They who had 
come from less than nothing, willed to rise equally 
high. 

Toussaint Louverture had counted himself the 
Napoleon of the blacks. Eighteen months after 
Napoleon had made himself First Consul, Toussaint 
had had himself voted Governor for Life of Haiti. 
And Dessalines had been content with governor- 
ship until he heard that Napoleon was to be an 
Emperor. 

Emperor! What a dazzling word to a slave! 
Emperor. . . . As Toussaint had followed in the 
steps of Napoleon, so was Dessalines also to follow. 
Dessalines, taking a long proud breath, would be 
Emperor! And surely an Emperor could not remem- 
ber the marks of flogging! 

He would go further than Napoleon. He would 


The Emperor's Statue 69 


have no other royalties created, for, he said, ‘‘I 

. . Talone am noble.” The populace had made 
him their idol; he could do what he liked. And six 
weeks after the news that Napoleon was to be 
Emperor reached Haiti, Dessalines was crowned 
Jacques, the First. 

So did Bonaparte set the pace for the blacks of 
Haiti. Toussaint, Dessalines, Christophe,—all in 
the crises of their lives, were influenced by the huge 
little man from Corsica. 

But the Emperor Dessalines proved to be brutal 
and profligate. The public treasury suffered, and 
the soldiers received neither pay nor rations: they 
even lacked food. And once more intrigue sim- 
mered, for the Haitians had not fought the French 
so desperately in order to bring upon themselves ruin. 

In the provinces of the north, of the west and of 
the south, conspiracy boiled. And when Dessalines 
had been two years Emperor it overflowed in the 
south; like a seething volcano that could no longer 
contain itself. 

The news found Dessalines at Marchand. His 
old intrepidity rose instantly to the crisis. With all 
his old fury against the French he now threatened 
his countrymen. 

‘“‘I desire,” he cried, “‘that my horse paw the 
ground in blood as far as Tiburon!”” And Tiburon 
is the last extremity of the peninsula of the south. 


70 Black Haiti 


Ignorant that his generals, Christophe and Pétion, 
were suspected of alliance with the forces against 
him, he had them written to at once. Christophe 
must hold himself ready to command the campaign, 
and Pétion must move immediately on the city of 
Cayes. 

Dessalines then hurried in person to the revolu- 
tionary south. Riding from Saint Marc to L’Arcahaie 
he saw before him smoke rising heavily. 

‘“Ah,”’ he exclaimed, ‘‘at this moment my col- 
league, Pétion, gives fire to the rebels!”’ 

He had sent ahead six companies under Thomas 
and Gédeon, and the words with which he dispatched 
them are recorded in one of the books found upon the 
dusty shelves of Madame Viard: | 

“You,” he said, ‘“you have the spirit to march in 
blood to Cayes!”’ 

He added that the department of the south would 
soon be such a solitude that one would not hear 
there even the crow of the cock. 

And could there bein Haiti greater desolation than 
that! 


Thomas and Gédeon had replied that they would 
do their duty—to whom, or to what they did not say. 
Riding on in advance of the soldiers these two offi- 
cers were taken prisoners by the Generals Gérin, 
Vuval and Yayou, who demanded that they go over 


The Emperor’s Statue 71 


to the revolutionist cause. Thomas seems to have 
hesitated but Gédeon transferred at once his alle- 
giance. But what—he consulted Gérin—what about 
the Emperor’s command that he post himself upon 
the bridge which was called Pont-Rouge? The 
Emperor had announced that from afar he expected 
to see Gédeon posted on the bridge. 

Gérin thought quickly. There was an adjutant- 
major who resembled Gédeon. . 

Of course there would be: the story of Haiti being 
ever in the manner of deliberately plotted extrava- 
ganza, as though in the very facts of their history 
the blacks could never escape drama; as though 
they were pawns in the hands of an omnipotent 
playwright who manipulated human material. As 
in a melodrama there would have been an adju- 
tant-major strongly resembling Gédeon, so there was 
his counterpart at Pont-Rouge. Equally of course 
Gérin commanded the two men to change uni- 
forms. The adjutant-general would be posted on 
the bridge, while Gédeon would be hurried on to 
Port-au-Prince where he was to report to Pétion. 

At dawn of the next day the Emperor left L’Arch- 
ahaie, riding in the early cool over the hot shade- 
less road, bordered by the pale green of mesquite and 
by grotesquely decorative cactus; over the road 
which keeps always on its right the great blue arc 
of the bay, and on its left the low hills. 


72 Black Haiti 


Even at that hour there were travellers on the 
road; proceeding on foot or donkey to this or that 
settlement. 

‘‘What is going on in the city?”’ 

But there was nothing, they said; nothing extra- 
ordinary in the city. 

So the Emperor rode without suspicion. 

It was nine o’clock when, within two hundred 
feet of Pont-Rouge, he turned to an officer. 

‘‘Do you see,’ he questioned, “‘there is Gédeon 
in the middle of the bridge. . . . The fellow is 
the very slave of discipline. JI must reward him.”’ 


But the dusty shelves say that he whom the 
Emperor took for Gédeon was but the adjutant- 
major, wearing the general’s uniform. 

‘‘Sire,’’ observed another, “‘I am singularly puzzled 
as to where are our soldiers of the south.’’ 

‘‘What would they have come to seek here?’”’ 

But to that there was never any answer . 
unless the low notes of the drums were answer; 
the drums which are in Haiti the pulsation of 
life. 

The drums sounded their soft, far-penetrating 
call. Almost at the same instant there were on all 
sides shouts. ‘‘Halte!’”’ 

‘‘Halte!’?’ And from every direction there rose 
up bayonettes. 


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Travellers on the 


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ai Ht re he en vs 
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on 
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aorta 


a 
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The Emperor’s Statue 73 


‘‘Soldiers, do you not recognize me? I am your 
Emperor!”’ 

Dessalines seized the club hanging at his saddle; 
using it to beat off the rain of bayonettes. 

There was an order to fire, but it is said to have 
been by a dagger that the Emperor fell, a lifeless 
mass; he whose horse was to have pawed the ground 
as far as Tiburon lay now rolling in his own blood. 
And to the mob the fleeing officers left him. Only 
Yayou seems to have remained. 


They stripped the Emperor who had not been 
able to spare them money for their clothes. They 
cut off his fingers that they might the more easily 
secure the gems which sparkled on them. ‘There was 
left only the body, marked as it was with fustiga- 
tions. 


‘Pick him up!’’ Yayou ordered. 

And contemplating what they laid upon a gun- 
stretcher, Yayou exclaimed, “‘Who would have 
said that a quarter of an hour ago this wretched 
creature could have made Haiti tremble?” 


It is not far by motor from Pont-Rouge to Port- 
au-Prince; but on foot, bearing the shapeless remains 
of an Emperor it must have seemed long, and very 
hot and dusty. 

‘“What criminal have you there?’’ It was the 


74 Black Haiti 


demented Défilée—the ‘‘pauvre folle’’—who ques- 
tioned. She had just happened to be passing; 
doubtless talking to herself and wandering, as such 
unfortunates do in Haiti; wandering from side to 
side of the road. 

‘What criminal have you there?’’ 

She had perhaps to ask several times before she 
commanded an answer. 

“It is Dessalines,’’ some one finally replied. 
‘*Dessalines—the Emperor.”’ 

‘*Dessalines!”’ 

The old book says that at the word her vivid eyes 
became calm and that the light of reason burned 
again in her troubled brain. 

She had then run off, to return with an empty 
coffee sack into which she put the fragments of 
the Emperor. With her burden she had hurried to 
the cemetery, to lay it upon a tomb beside which 
she knelt. And there she mourned until two sol- 
diers came, with orders from Pétion to bury the 
sack which contained Dessalines. 

Défilée mourned, but the dusty shelves did not 
disclose whether she lamented the Founder of the 
Independence; or whether her grief was for the man; 
whether it was as a woman, with reason returned 
to her brain, that she wept for a man who had 
loved dancing and women, and whose marked body 
was dear and familiar to her. 


The Emperor’s Statue 75 


Books in which Haitians have appraised their 
heroes state that the murder was the direct conse- 
quence of the Emperor’s violent and autocratic 
character. But they question whether there could 
have been a national independence, had Dessalines 
been of the moderation of a Toussaint or a Pétion. 

‘‘He was more than a lion,” they declare, “‘he 
was a tiger... . But was not a tiger necessary to 
conquer the fierce beasts of Colonial power ?’’ 

‘“‘He died,” they continue, “because he made 
himself the tyrant of his brothers.... But he 
none the less remains the Founder of our Inde- 
pendence.” 

Thus to the Haitians their heroes are not lay 
figures stuffed with noble sawdust, but men—Afri- 
cans of extraordinary personality. 


IV 


Nearly a hundred years must pass before Presi- 
dent Hyppolite places a mausoleum over the remains 
which the poor folle, Défilée, protected by a coffee 
sack, and it is a century before the iron Dessalines 
comes to dominate the Champ-de-Mars. In those 
years Haiti has a king, another emperor, and many 
presidents. Among them there is the wise and 
gentle mulatto Pétion, with his vision of a Repub- 
lic; a man so kind that he was known by his people 


76 Black Haiti 


as ‘‘Papa bon coeur’’; a man too mild indeed for 
the turbulent times. Pétion, they say died of mel- 
ancholy and disappointment; his visions so far 
exceeding his accomplishments. Yet he founded 
schools and laid the basis of a future democratic 
prosperity by distributing the lands of the south 
among the officers and soldiers of the Independence. 
But strength rather than gentleness survives, and 
it is after all Dessalines that dominates the Champ- 
de-Mars. And, although at his death the people 
deeply and sincerely mourned, few now pause to 
read upon the tomb of Pétion that it was erected 
by ‘‘the tender friendship”’ of the woman who had 
‘“‘shared his destiny,”’ and that until the hour of his 
dying he had never caused her to shed a tear. 


In that hundred years a civilization crystallized in 
Haiti. It was modelled upon the French tradition. 
From France it drew its ideals and its culture; graft- 
ing these things upon Africa. At our long distance 
focus we talk inclusively about Haitians, but with a 
vast vagueness about where Haiti is and about 
what Haitians are. 

Black of course. Yet there are more degrees of 
blackness than there are grades of society. There 
are Haitians no darker than Spaniards or Italians, 
and there are Haitians as black as teakwood. There 
is even color prejudice: as there has been from the 


The Emperor’s Statue 77 


beginning: not so violent or wholesale a prejudice 
as can be found in the States; a prejudice indeed 
scarcely at first perceptible, but nevertheless quite 
definite in those social circles where mahogany hes- 
itates to marry with teakwood. ‘The line is certainly 
slack, according to Nordic standards, but it exists. 

And these divisions of color are made up of peas- 
ants, merchants, cotton and coffee brokers, shop 
keepers, landed proprietors, teachers and physicians, 
men of letters, and, unfortunately, as in our own 
case—of politicians. 


V 


In the great airy houses set back among palm 
and orange trees there is a ceremonious social life. 

We are bidden to a tea in our honor. 

There is a gateway; a drive; a jungle of tropical 
foliage, fragrant as some treasured memory; under 
the trees a fountain plays. Down a flight of steps 
the host advances, to take my arm and with a leg- 
endary courtliness to conduct me into the house to 
the hostess who is, in this case, the daughter of Haiti’s 
murst Minister to the United States, sent during 
the presidency of Lincoln. 

In the dining room tea is exquisitely set forth. 
Recalling it, I think at first only of pink roses, of a 
wealth and glory of roses. Then I remember that 


78 Black Haiti 


among the roses there was the gleam of much silver. 
There were candles whose light polished the silver. 
I remember cakes and sandwiches, ices and cham- 
pagne. And guests with great eagerness desiring to 
know what we think of Haiti; do we like it; is it not 
beautiful, and have we been to Pétionville? And 
the hostess saying, ‘‘We have had sad days . 

sad days. But truly we are not so bad as they say. 
You know what they say? They say that we eat 
people raw.” 

Pink roses and silver and dainty cakes. Men 
and women with gracious manners speaking beau- 
tiful French. A pretty, sparklingly vivacious young 
woman who is the granddaughter of that Presi- 
dent Geffrard, under whom so many years ago was 
brought to trial the famous cannibalism case at 
Bizoton. Roses and champagne and silver. Men 
who had represented their country at the Court of St. 
James; the Vatican; France and Italy. Cultivated 
people, opening wide their hospitable homes to 
chance travellers; and driven to explain that they 
are not so bad as is said; that they do not eat people 
raw. What misunderstanding and humiliation have 
the few descendants of that one human flesh-eating 
tribe, not brought upon troubled Haiti! 

When we go, escorted by our host to the waiting 
motor, the little fountain under the trees is full of 
moonlight. 


The Emperor's Statue 79 


Out along the Bizoton Road the peasants have 
lit their flaming chimney-less kerosene torches. 
Every afternoon the gas-girls patrol the streets sell- 
ing oil. Five-gallon tins are balanced on their 
heads and with swinging arms they walk, stepping 
with the long free stride of Haiti; calling as they 
walk: 

“Ga-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-z |” 

Filling their lungs with air and letting it seep 
slowly out until the pronunciation of the final z 
immediately precedes a fresh inflation. ‘Their cry, 
like the soft note of a bird, echoes up and down the 
streets of Port-au-Prince, and out into the suburban 
villages of Bizoton and Carrefour. 

But when you may drink the moon from the 
fountain under our host’s trees the gas-girls no longer 
pace the streets; for all with money to buy are al- 
ready supplied with ‘‘gaz”’ for those night torches 
whose flaring lights illumine the dark for the two 
million peasants in the midst of which the educated 
minority has striven to build a self-governing nation; 
struggling under towering difficulties, in a world 
where, without distinction or discrimination, Hai- 
tians have been merely Haitians. 

There in Haiti, like an island in a sea of peasantry, 
this tiny group of the cultivated has endeavored to 
govern. And the peasantry, lit by the flicker of 
torches, is not a stolid, but a volatile race; easily 


80 Black Haiti 


moved, with emotions poised, like panthers in the 
dusk waiting to be stirred into springing action— 
by beauty, by music or laughter, by fear or hatred. 

‘“They are very quiet,’ a Haitian friend said of 
them, ‘‘quiet and serviceable. . . . Oh, very serv- 
iceable.”’ 


VI 


It was in their quality of being easily moved that 
the danger lay. The years just before the Great 
War were years in which an earthquake of unrest 
shook the human race. In Haiti revolution fol- 
lowed revolution; an increase in disturbance which, 
according to rumor, may have been to some extent 
instigated by a European power. But that is 
rumor only. 

Bellegarde opens the history of the century with 
the statement that “‘upon the acclamation by the 
troops of Alexis Nord as President, many took the 
road to exile.” And I let this amazingly honest 
author, who has also been Director of Secondary In- 
struction in Haiti, tell the story; rather than quoting 
from any alien writer to whom might be applied the 
proverb that “‘before the chicken, the grasshopper is 
never right.” 

Early in 1900, upon the night when the iron Des- 
salines came to preside over the Champ-de-Mars, a 


The Emperor’s Statue 81 


former Minister of Finance was put to death. Four 
years later the exiled revolutionists returned, were 
defeated, and their leader executed. Another four 
years and the Emperor standing on his pedestal in 
the square saw the national palace shaken by a ter- 
rific explosion; saw the flames in which many off- 
cers and soldiers perished with the President. 

That same day a successor was elected who lived 
to hold office but nine months; dying of a mysterious 
and suspicious ‘‘maladie de langeur.’”’ And, threat- 
ened by a revolutionary band of brigands, his suc- 
cessor resigned and departed to some foreign coun- 
try. In the next eighteen months three bandit 
leaders held in turn the office of President. The 
last of the three was Guillaume Sam. 

And with him, Bellegarde closes his child’s his- 
tory of Haiti. The final question of that little 
pink book whose honesty I so admire, is: 

“Dans quel état se trouva notre pays de Février 1914 
a Juillet 1915?”’ 

And the children are to reply that ‘“‘between 
those dates anarchy and disorder deprived us of a 
permanent government.” 


Vil 


It was June, 1915, and an army of rebels threat- 
ening Cape Haiti, marines were landed from a 


82 Black Haiti 


French cruiser. Six weeks later in Port-au-Prince 
Guillaume Sam had executed nearly two hundred 
political prisoners, many of whom belonged to the 
most honorable families. The official who directed 
the murder was seized in the Dominican Legation 
and assassinated. Representatives of England and 
France cabled for war ships. 

And two days later the Emperor’s statue saw the 
murder of Sam. 

They are easily moved, those peasants described 
as “‘quiet and very serviceable.’”” The massacre 
in the prison had shocked all Port-au-Prince, and 
the populace rose up in wild indignation against 
this brigand President who had decreed wholesale 
slaughter. They dragged him from the French 
Legation to which he had fled by way of the wall 
which separated the Legation from the old presi- 
dential palace. 

With that same vengeful joy which Dessalines had 
directed against whites, the angry crowd had butch- 
ered Guillaume Sam, and cut in pieces his body. 

And no poor ‘“‘folle’’ like Défilée is recorded as 
having mourned the fragments. 


VIll 


A white Occupation remains in Haiti, for the 
little group of the cultivated whose hospitality is 


The Emperor’s Statue 83 


so warmly gracious, seemed no longer able to handle 
their great problem without assistance. And there 
is furthermore a Monroe Doctrine which must be 
either abandoned or upheld. 

Considered in any American scene which has 
known a struggle for independence, the Monroe 
Doctrine, for all its past usefulness, seems high 
handed in form and in spirit. The time has come 
for it to be replaced by a brother Federation of the 
American Democracies, collaborating to safeguard 
the integrity of their soil and to police the Hemi- 
sphere in which it is our job to maintain peace and 
order. But so long as the antiquated Doctrine per- 
sists, it is difficult to see how to escape such inter- 
ventions as that which occurred in Haiti in 1915. 

And so at the French pension on the hill, United 
States Marines don white uniforms, while in the 
darkness cocoanut palms dance to the rhythm of the 
night wind. 

At meals these marine boys rattle on entertain- 
ingly about their own affairs. There is the story 
of the first airplane to fly from the Port to the Cape. 
‘Two men,” they say, ‘‘went crazy at the sight and 
a woman dropped dead. When the plane landed, 
it ran bang into a tumble-down shack. The old 
woman who lived there didn’t even notice the plane, 
though she’d never seen one before. She just stood 
cursing because her shack had been damaged. Boy, 


84 Black Haiti 


you should have heard that old femme cursing us 
Outs, 

The Marines love to embellish their talk with for- 
eign words, much as the globe-trotter cherishes the 
hotel labels on his luggage. 

“Chow” and ‘‘chit”” and “‘tiffin”’ the boys have 
brought from cruises in the Orient. ‘‘Hombre”’ 
and ‘‘adios’’? mean a station at some time in the 
Philippines, Cuba or Santo Domingo. ‘‘Femme”’ 
and ‘‘beaucoup’’ are Haiti; or perhaps relics of the 
France of the Great War. 

Mix these foreign words with plenty of such 
Marine-American as “‘cuckoo’”’ for crazy; ‘‘like a 
crutch”’ for like hell; “‘fruit salad’’ for a sinecure; 
‘“‘too hot” for so good; and such nautical expres- 
sions as ‘‘shoving off’’ or “‘letting her ride’’—and 
you have the vernacular of that pension among the 
palms. 

Sometimes in this vernacular there are tragic 
anecdotes. There was the Marine in Santo Do- 
mingo who with his rifle at battle sight had ‘‘picked 
off’? four escaping prisoners who had disregarded 
the order to halt; ‘‘bumped ’em off cold, one after 
the other. Got ’em every one and at battle sight. 
Boy, that was shooting! 

‘‘Then the Marine went cuckoo—plumb cuckoo. 
Had to be sent back to the States. Said all four of 
those hombres were walkin’ on his chest. Couldn’t 


The Emperor’s Statue 85 


get it out of his head that they walked on his 
chest.’ 

“But you know that was shooting!”’ 

Often, after the marine boys have departed at 
the break-neck speed which they affect, though their 
destination be nothing more important than a new 
‘‘movie,’’ I pause in the living-room to talk with 
Madame of the Pension. I find her there alone 
with her solitaire spread out before her on a little 
table. Through big open doors the night drifts 
in bringing with it bewildered moths to flutter about 
the lights. 

Madame readily abandons the shifting of her 
aces and queens and knaves, surrendering her game 
to talk. And Madame’s talk is fascinating. She 
has lived twenty-five years in Haiti, and in her swift 
dramatic French-accented English, she floods those 
years with a light as spontaneous as that often cast 
upon the Occupation by idle chatter around a tea- 
table, or by the careless banter of marines. 

In the beginning, says Madame, long ago when 
she first came to Haiti, a century after the massacres 
and just before the statue of Dessalines was set up 
in the Champ-de-Mars . . . there were then so 
few whites; you wouldn’t believe how few, nor how 
great was the consideration shown them. When 
there was rumor of revolution Madame would— 
just to be on the safe side—hang out the British 


86 Black Haiti 


flag. Her husband had been a Britisher, so she 
had the right. She remembered how soldiers had 
once come, politely urging her to close her front 
windows and doors, as they were about to attack 
some Official living in the house across the way; 
the house which is now the American Club. 

Madame’s reminiscences are not political, but 
human and humorous: not to be taken as history, 
but rather as that gossip which is the salt of his- 
tory. In gay or dramatic anecdotes she sees pres- 
idents and revolutions. So and so was a fine pres- 
ident and a good man, but there was another, very 
ignorant, a member of the Voodoo sect. This man 
had had a “‘familiar,’”’ a goat under whose personal 
protection he lived. When the goat died he had had 
it buried with the full honors of Catholicism, pass- 
ing the corpse off to the priest as a deceased relative. 
How angry Monseigneur had been when it was dis- 
covered that the Church had buried a goat! 

Madame remembers also the president who with 
his eye on the uncertainty of the morrow had, upon 
assuming office, voted himself his seven years’ salary 
in advance. 

And it was in Madame’s time that Hyppolite had 
died. In fact the pension which she made so happy 
a place for Marines, had been the home of Hyppo- 
lite’s brother. And it was Hyppolite who had, 
after the passing of nearly a hundred years, erected 


The Emperor’s Statue 87 


a mausoleum to those remains of Dessalines which 
Défilée had gathered in her coffee sack. 

Of this President Hyppolite many things had been 
“‘wheespered.” It was ‘‘wheespered”’ that the mis- 
tress with whom he lived quite openly was a Voodoo 
priestess. She presided over his summer home at 
Mon Repos, on the bay beyond the village of Bizo- 
ton. The people were becoming incensed; Hyppo- 
lite, they felt, being tyrannical, and everything 
being “‘Mademoiselle; Mademoiselle.”” Revolts in- 
creased in numbers and in strength. Hyppolite’s 
physician pronounced his heart to be in serious con- 
dition: he must not personally lead his troops. 
Then it was ‘‘wheespered”’ that from the church of 
Saint Joseph the ‘‘Holy Host” had been stolen, 
and further hinted that Mademoiselle was the thief, 
that she had stolen it as a talisman which should 
protect Hyppolite. The priest delivered a sermon 
predicting that death would avenge the theft. Hyp- 
polite rode out to battle, wearing the sacred talis- 
man. At least so said the soft whisper of rumor. 
And Hyppolite fell dead upon his horse as he rode 
to meet the rebels; dead of heart failure. 

And what became of the mistress who was a 
Voodoo priestess? 

But that Madame does not remember. 

It is well to take gaily, like Madame, the fiascos of 
democracy; otherwise we might break our hearts 


88 Black Haiti 


over the tragic way we must travel toward that 
difficult goal which is the only cure for autocracy. 
For we, too, have occasionally known what it is to 
be governed by political brigands. 


It is at dusk one day that we come out upon the 
Champ-de-Mars. We come from the glitter of the 
President’s reception, where every possible nuance 
of black and white has been assembled in the hand- 
some spacious rooms. 

The guests pour down the steps and into the 
plaza, pouring from the dazzle inside out into the 
filmy pearl dusk; and in the transition it is the dark 
faces whose features first fade into unrecognizable 
blur, the mulattoes next, and last of all the whites; 
night at once assimilating the negro countenance, 
hesitating over the mulatto and the white. As 
they flow from the too brilliant artificiality of elec- 
tricity into the fleeting moment of the dusk, French 
and English are borne on the tide of their going; lan- 
guage and laughter drifting from the palace and into 
the motors which then whirl away, around the statue, 
and up to the residences lit like lamps among their 
foliage. 

The head-lights of the motors flash as they swirl 
around the statue. Their horns warn pedestrians. 
In the uncertain twilight it is difficult to analyze 
the current of those pedestrians, but among them 


The Emperor's Statue 89 


perhaps are sailors from a newly-docked Transport, 
and they will without question be on their way to 
“De Reix,’”’ where they will consume quantities of 
food because the Transport, as they say, ‘“‘feeds 
bum”’; and they will succumb to quantities of liquor 
because at home there is prohibition. At De Reix 
on such an evening you will hear, uncensored, many 
of the poor foolish words which ladies are not sup- 
posed to know. 

Since it is Mardi Gras there are undoubtedly in 
the hazy stream of pedestrians eddying about the 
statue, the fantastic figures of masqueraders. For 
during the weeks preceding Ash Wednesday mas- 
queraders roam the streets of Port-au-Prince. You 
may come without warning upon a skeleton, a Pier- 
rot, a company of old-time Haitian Generals on 
horseback, a band of Congo savages, a Wandering 
Jew, a group of black men whitened, wearing blond 
wigs of millet and walking with exaggeratedly minc- 
ing steps. 

The streams of motor and of pedestrian thus whirl 
and eddy, but at last the iron Dessalines is left 
alone with his uplifted sword. 

Again the statue takes on life. In the dark the 
plumes of the hat may flutter, though night has 
blotted out memory of their color. And could the 
statue have its will, after all that has come and 
gone around it, what would that will be? Would it 


go Black Haiti 


fiercely maintain the right-not-to-be-done-good-to? 
Or does it, standing with poised sword, listen to the 
voice of some symbolic Claire Heureuse, a voice sug- 
gesting that possibly those whites who have just 
gone forth from the President’s reception . 

possibly they, like Descourtils, may be useful; a 
voice suggesting that perhaps the thoughtful white, 
the swarthy man, with the dark hair and the analytic 
eyes, may be entirely sincere in his schemes to in- 
crease Haitian revenue; that there is something of 
courage, a quality loved by Dessalines, in that 
white’s quiet indifference to the unpopularity 
certain to follow the impartial justice of his schemes? 
And, reassured by silence, does the voice continue; 
insinuating that there may have been only good will 
in the florid white General who tells with paternal 
pride of the marksmanship of Haitian blacks at 
the Olympic rifle matches in Paris; tells of how 
little Haiti came in second among the competing 
nations of the world? An iron Dessalines would 
be proud of such marksmanship. So that, grown 
bold, the symbolic voice may now declare that to be 
useful is actually the desire of some of these whites 
who day after day pass before the statue; incredible 
though that desire may seem to a Dessalines who 
cannot forget . . . blood-hounds, or fustigations. 


THE FLOWERED SHIRT 


I 


OswALD DURAND wore a flowered shirt. I never 
saw any man in Haiti wearing such a shirt. Per- 
haps no other ever did. Yet I have before me the 
faded reproduction of a photograph. And there 
it is—a loose collarless blouse with large single blos- 
soms scattered over a dark background. What 
were their colors? That I am afraid I shall never 
know. Georges Sylvain might have told me; but 
just when I was writing to ask, Georges Sylvain 
Ceca nie: 

About the neck of the flowered shirt in the photo- 
graph there is carelessly knotted a handkerchief. 
It has not taken white, but that vague light shade 
which may mean yellow, pale blue, pink or certain 
tints of green. The cuffs are unfastened and the 
sleeves pushed up from the wrists. There are dark 
trousers, the suspenders of which have been slipped 
from the shoulders and left hanging about the 
hips. 

The figure of the man thus portrayed is heavy, the 

gI 


92 Black Haiti 


head large, with a great shock of snowy hair stand- 
ing out like a spun halo. There is a high forehead, 
fearless eyes and a white mustache. The skin, 
they say, was bronze, ‘‘gilded like our brown corn.”’ 
And you call him Oswald, this man in negligent 
dress who sits writing at a small table. You call 
him quite simply and naturally by his first name; 
in spite of the fact that he died full of years and of 
honors: in spite even of that other photograph in 
which he is shown in the sombre coat of a modern 
male; starched white shirt, stiff collar, and white 
bow tie—all quite punctilious, quite as though such 
things were important. But the tie is slightly askew 
and the second button of the coat is unfastened. 
So that he is after all our unceremonious Oswald. 
This second picture is labelled ‘‘Poéte Nationale 
de la République D’Hait.”” But if you have read 
Choucoune and Idalina the sonorous phrase does 
not alarm you. You go right on saying Oswald. 
The Haitians have called this man their Mistral, 
their poet who is of the land, who gave to Haiti a 
literature peculiarly its own. They might add, 
for Anglo-Saxon benefit, that he is their Walt Whit- 
man, their Bobbie Burns. At the time of his death, 
nearly twenty years ago, the literary men of Haiti 
assembled the sheaf of tributes and memoirs, which 
they printed under the title of La Derniére Etape. 
There, one after another will tell you that Oswald 


The Flowered Shirt 93 


incarnates and “‘divulges’’ the soul of their country, 
and there they too reveal and further elucidate that 
soul. 


For a time Oswald lived at Bizoton-les-Bains, 
which is a tiny village on the road out of Port-au- 
Prince, along the north shore of the southern penin- 
sula. 

And when you have seen this little Bizoton you 
have the poems of Oswald Durand illustrated in all 
the senses; in gorgeous color; in creole inflections and 
creole laughter; in the perfume of frangipani and 
orange blossoms; in the warm touch of the sun and 
the soft light stroke of the breeze which comes by day 
from the west, across the bay, and which is scented 
by the time it reaches you. 

At Bizoton, unbelievably small wooden houses 
put on superior airs with the high-roofed thatched 
cottages among which they stand. There wooden 
houses are grand indeed if they have so many as 
three rooms. But no matter, they have roofs of 
corrugated iron, and that sets them apart from 
their humbly picturesque neighbors with white- 
washed mud walls supporting dark peaked caps of 
thatch. 

But even the arrogant wooden houses become 
lovely when the great pinnated shadows of the bread- 
fruit leaves dance over them; when a big, deep green 


Oars Black Haiti 


mango tree suspends above them the unshed tears 
of its ripe gold fruit; or when they are framed in 
cactus hedges, over-run with the bright pink glory of 
the coral vine. 

Such houses dot both sides of the road; on one side 
extending back a short distance to the foot of the 
hills, on the other fringing the sparkle of the 
bay. 

There is a tiny sandy beach to match the tiny 
houses. To reach it, you walk through fields of 
sugar-cane and rice; walking along a soggy two-foot- 
wide dike between watery trenches where grow the 
delicate green blades of pale young rice. 

Along the line of the shore are cocoanut palms, 
twisted into the undulating shape of the night 
wind’s dance. 

Close by, a little stream foams over white stones, 
and there, under the shade of trees, is the great 
meeting-place of laundresses, where every day you 
may see women pounding clothes on the glistening 
rocks, while all around them on the grass are spread 
to dry many-colored garments, fantastic caricatures 
of human forms. 


This is the world that Oswald Durand set to the 
music of his verse. One of those thirty-three lit- 
erary Haitians whose tributes appear in La Derniére 
Etape, wrote from Europe that when he heard the 





At Bizoton. 


re, 


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ip Lyi 
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Vew? 

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ip ye ta 
ee? e ae joe 


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The Flowered Shirt 95 


sad news of the poet’s death, his thoughts were con- 
tinually fixed in Haiti, re-visiting Bizoton, the blue 
bay and the wanton laundresses, with nearby always 
‘‘the beautiful figure of Oswald, so strangely resem- 
bling that of Dumas Fils.”’ 

There is another who remembers him as he used 
to sit writing at a little wooden table and wearing 
the blouse sprigged with blossoms, while through the 
foliage of vine, or of languid banana leaves, there 
often appeared the profile of a smiling mulatress. 
Oswald, he comments, made verse like a sculptor— 
with a living model. 

And still another remembers that when he would 
meet him on the Bizoton road, he would find that 
always he was talking to a woman. 

‘“He loved,” they say, “‘and he sang of what he 
loved. He loved Haiti, he loved humanity, and he 
loved—la volupté.”’ 

“He had superlatively the cult of woman... . 
He was to the last intoxicated with her... .He 
loved the poetry of the flesh, the fugitive perfume of 
loves which did not endure... . He was the hap- 
piest singer of our creole nymphs, setting to poetry 
our enchanting landscape....An immense love 
circles from one end of his work to the other.”’ 

These men build the picture, until, taking this 
from one, and that from another, Oswald himself 
comes to life... . 


96 Black Haiti 


He is walking on the Bizoton road, walking with 
slow and cadenced step. For why should a poet 
hurry? Why, when he so delights in the flowing 
life of the road, the ceaseless coming and going of 
the peasants who flock in to the market of Port- 
au-Prince, bringing down the produce of the hills and 
returning with their city purchases—lengths of bright 
cotton, tin cups and spoons. 

The road is accented in red; in red hibiscus and 
poinsettias aflame in the sun, and, in their proper 
season, with the fiery blossoms of the flamboyant; 
the road is red with the turbans of market women 
balanced on wee donkeys with mild deprecating 
faces; it is red with the neck handkerchiefs of horse- 
men clattering in and out of town; and again with 
poinsettias, with hibiscus, with the turbans of 
women, . 

Over and over again the road is accented in the pas- 
sionate note of red. And Oswald walks on the road 
—‘‘a grand, robust old man with proud shining eyes, 
stopping now and then to talk toa woman... .” 

Felix Viard Saint-Robert, riding back from Mari- 
ani to the city, comes upon Oswald as he stands gaz- 
ing attentively at a roost-ward flight of birds, dark 
against the gilded sunset light. 

“Stop your pony!”’ cries Oswald. ‘‘Cavalier, foot 
toearthi ci iComeri atv Ise note latean want 


The Flowered Shirt 97 


to talk to you about your friend, Bruny. Then I 
will read you some verses.” 


Or Oswald is among the adoring protégés which 
always swarm around him; calling him “‘Dear Mas- 
’” and being answered with his paternal ‘‘Mon 
Petit.” Bruny is there, quite crushed by the crit- 


ical attack of some comrade. There has been 


Ler, 


punch and Oswald has been reading in his organ 
voice. But Bruny remains disconsolate. 

‘‘Learn to laugh at jealous criticism,’’ Oswald 
counsels. ‘‘Why, at twenty years old one ought to 
be strong—courageous! One must be encased in 
an armor of self-love, in order that one may be 
proof against the bloodthirsty words of that fool 
crowd—the envious. 

‘Continue, Mon Petit; persevere, and you will 
have success. Work closely, and you will see those 
who envy you raise statues to you.”’ 


Oswald is seated on a stone contemplating once 
more the assembled host of the laundresses. He 
is now an old man, but with flame in his eyes defy- 
ing the pallid age of his brow. ‘There, on the stone, 
Raynaud finds him, watching again the “‘graceful and 
undulating forms of the half-clad women; contem- 
plating the hips which bend and curve and arch; the 
arms on which muscles swell with the effort of beat- 


98 Black Haiti 


ing’’—of raising and lowering the mahogany paddles 
which beat the clothes clean in the frothy river 
water. He contemplates the “‘firm, powerful calves 
of the women’s legs’’ as they glisten, wet and shin- 
ing, in the sun. Oswald loves the poetry of the 
flesh. 

‘‘And brooding thus,’ Raynaud says, ‘“he must 
have felt mounting to his head a world of memories; 
while all the time the palm tosses its green plumes, 
the water frisks and foams, and in the trees birds 
murmur.” 


Listening to the gay banter of those laundresses 
of Bizoton, I always felt that such was the birth- 
place of proverbs; the mint where through the 
years there had been coined those hundreds of humor- 
ous and ironical sayings in which live so much joy 
and wisdom, cynicism and pity—the proverbs which 
flavor all the talk of the Haitian peasant. 

Undoubtedly when Oswald sat meditative on the 
stone, resurrecting the voluptuous past, there was 
some withered dame, pounding perhaps a young 
pink frock, who let her paddle pause while she quav- 
ered that ‘‘the heart has no wrinkles.’”” Another 
might have added that ‘‘joy, like sorrow, has its 
tears,’ or that ‘‘the most beautiful tomorrow does 
not give you back yesterday,” or sadly, that “‘each 
hour wounds, but the last kills.” 


’ 


The Flowered Shirt 99 


With so many young girls gathered at the river, 
girls young and round like Choucoune, there must 
also have been saucy jibes. Possibly one, observ- 
ing the dreamy Oswald, had laughed that the ‘‘apron 
works for the pantaloons.”’ 

And there must have been a song, for it is the 
Haitian custom to set toil to music, repeating over 
and over, in varied minor melody, some simple 
phrase. They would certainly have made a song, a 
song which might well have been about the heart’s 
having no wrinkles. 

And Oswald would have responded with gay sally 
or philosophy; loving the singers and familiar with 
the patois, which is French oddly Africanized, and 
punctuated with eloquent little ‘‘oh—ohs,”’ ‘‘ah— 
ahs”? and ‘‘uh—uhs,”’ as well as with even less 
translatable ‘‘ngs’’ and ‘“‘gns”’; numberless little mono- 
syllabic sounds expressing shades of emotion. 

Yes, there Oswald was indeed at home. The 
women whose polished bodies glistened, whose tur- 
bans blazed in the sun, like flowers, were his hero- 
ines; his Manounes, and Choucounes and Zounes— 
mulattoes and griffonnes, negresses and marabouts; 
with strange pretty creole names. 


Haiti has had an occasional Puritan to protest 
against the personal life of the poet, declaring him 
to be a ‘‘faun who sacrificed ridiculously to love.” 


100 Black Haiti 


But the voice of the Puritan is faint, for this soul 
which is being revealed to us is Africo-French, and 
not Anglo-Saxon. The Puritan protest is therefore 
little more than a breath. 

It is enough that Oswald Durand was an artist. 
“To this Epicurean of the Renaissance, lost or strayed 
in our streets, badly lit with petrol,’’ Georges Syl- 
vain maintains, ‘‘the muses will have pardoned much 
because he loved much.”’ 

Reading the thirty-three authors, halting now and 
then to look up some uncertain French word, you 
feel yourself to be, in a very actual sense, exploring 
the national soul which they have agreed is divulged 
by Oswald Durand. You wander through the 
familiar fields of patriotism where Anglo-Saxon and 
Africo-French can meet understandingly: but even 
there you see a difference, for we are semi- 
religiously patriotic, whereas with the Haitian, 
patriotism is a personal passion, like love. We need 
a stimulant to wake it, and then it is apt, like the 
dormouse, to drop off again and to need a little hot 
tea poured on its nose. But in the Haitian, patriot- 
ism and the individual ego have not yet been sep- 
arated, but are bound together like Siamese twins. 
Patriotism circulates in the blood, a warm, unreason- 
ing thing, elemental and passionate. 

In further exploration you stray into areas of 
domestic affection where the landscape is placidly 


The Flowered Shirt IOI 


familiar; the sun is perhaps warmer, but you do not 
feel yourself at all a stranger. And then you enter 
a dark bitter land, a devastated region such as your 
race, if you are of Nordic origin, has never known. 
Red and blue flowers grow there among blackened 
ruins. They are pride flowers, and they have been 
watered by tears and nourished by contempt. 

You begin then to know that you have come upon 
a journey; that. you are in an exotic land, where a 
vibrant patriotism and a fierce defiant pride of race 
exalt the humble origin of the poet as well as of the 
heroes of those victorious days of the Independence, 
those days of their ‘‘glorious ancestors.’”’ Oswald, 
their poet, they feel has proved that ‘‘even in the 
divine art the negro is inferior to none.”’. . . Os- 
wald has ‘‘avenged their insults. ..has always 
protected and encouraged and loved them... 
and has cherished with them the sweet hope of a 
future grandeur for their unhappy country.”’ 

Thus these Haitian men of letters construct, bit 
by bit, the picture; not only of the poet who wore 
the flowered blouse, but of themselves; laying bare 
their own hearts. So that in your exploration you 
move carefully, tenderly, as among sensitive living 
plants and flowers which have survived much that 
you have mercifully been spared. In the reasons 
for which they love Oswald you begin to see how 
greatly they have suffered. ‘‘Into our unquiet and 


102 _ Black Haiti 


tormented spirits,’ they say, ‘“‘he infused a divining 
mind.”’ 

If you are a typical Anglo-Saxon, accepting with- 
out question your inheritance, it is in the final region 
of sexual morality, into which inevitably your explo- 
rations lead, that you find yourself most alien; for 
the Haitian is French as well as African: not only 
is his tradition partly French, but in the veins of 
many there courses the actual blood of France. 
In the bringing together of those two elements each 
has intensified the racial quality of the other. In 
the United States the Anglo-Saxon influence to 
some extent denatured the African. In the 
Spanish-American countries, a certain austerity in 
the conquerors, subdued the negro; but in Haiti 
the mingling of France with Africa was like giv- 
ing to Africa a drink of champagne: with the 
result that the personality of Haiti is singularly 
vital. 

Remembering all that, you follow the thirty-three 
Haitian authors into the mooted territory of morals, 
and you read how Lecorps justifies the poet’s frankly 
unmoral creed. 

‘“Each one of us,’’ he writes, ‘‘has his manner of 
understanding this thing which is the raison d’étre 
of humanity, the thing which supports us in this 
sad life. There are those who put more discretion 
into their amours; others who put none at all, and 


The Flowered Shirt 103 


are proud to defy austere public opinion. To these 
Oswald belonged. . 

“‘For my part, I believe that we are born with the 
aptitudes for that which we ought to be; with the 
muscles, robust or feeble, which make us what we 
have to be. I go even further. I think that if 
you and I are not epicurians in folly, it is not that 
we do not wish it, but because we are unable. The 
machine of flesh and blood which God has given us 
at birth is too fragile for that. 

“Then, when we are thus, nothing is more easy 
than to go out and battle against the insupportable 
intemperance of others. We judge guilty those 
whom we do not dare to imitate. 

““Voua! That is how one arrives at being a 
moralist.”’ 

“You have lived well, dear Oswald,’’ writes an- 
other. ‘“‘You should have but one regret; that of 
no longer resting in the shade of Bizoton on the 
border of the sea under the shade of the palm tree 
which symbolized for you all the pride of your 
race!’ 


Thus does that national soul, which they say sang 
in Oswald, sing in them all. All are possessed in 
some measure of his intense vitality. All would 
“‘accept life as it is, good or bad, wise or foolish.”’ 

And here your exploring, if you happen to be 


104 Black Haiti 


that orthodox Anglo-Saxon, has landed you in a 
world where what you have been accustomed to 
consider supreme occupies a lesser place, while the 
qualities you thought unimportant have been ele- 
vated. The pedestals are there, but the idols are 
different. You find that a merry welcome, a loving 
outgoing to humanity, and an indulgence for the 
faults of others, stand upon the pedestals. Beside 
these qualities your own strict moral code is 
rated as insignificant. And whether or not you 
breathe easily in this new air depends upon how 
strongly your tradition has you in its grip. 

These men who, in writing of Oswald Durand, 
conduct you into the secret places of a national soul, 
overflow in the tropical warmth of their friendship 
for the poet. When, after his death, Douyon sought 
verses in which to commemorate him, tears came 
instead. Another says that he writes with trembling 
hand. Yet it is above all as artist that they exalt 
him. He held political office and wrote patriotic 
poems, but they unite in acclaiming him, not for mere 
showy achievements, but as the singer of their soil. 
They rejoice without stint in the ‘‘succés fow’’ which 
such verses as ‘‘Idalina”’ received in Paris. 

But of his haunting rhythms of the land I think 
the one most dear to Haitians is the heart-breaking 
little song of Choucoune: written not in French, 
which was Oswald’s usual medium, but in the cre- 


The Flowered Shirt 105 


ole patois where the tongues of France and of Africa 
meet and merge. 


Il 


The verses begin with the first encounter of Chou- 
coune with her lover. And in the poem, it is the 
lover who tells the tragic little tale. 


Behind a great tuft of Spanish bayonet he discovered his 
Choucoune. 

She had smiled when she saw him. 

And he had cried, ‘‘Heaven, what a beautiful girl!” 

*‘Do you find me so, dear?”’ 

And all the little birds of the air had listened. . . . 

When he remembered, Choucoune’s lover had been sad; 

For since that day he had two feet inachain. . . . 


P'’tuts zoézeaux ta pé couté nous lan lair . . . 
Quand moin songé ca, moin gangnin la peine 
Car dempi jou-la, dé pieds moin lan chaine:! . . 


Choucoune was a marabout, 

With eyes as clear as light; 

She had firm little breasts. 

Ah, if Choucoune had been faithful! 


She was a marabout, which is to say that, accord- 
ing to the painstaking classifications of Moreau de 
St. Méry, made at the end of the eighteenth cen- 
tury when the French Colonial Government regis- 
tered more than sixty different combinations of 


106 Black Haiti 


white with negro blood, this little Choucoune had 
come into being in one of five ways. 

She might have been the result of a mating of 
negress with quateron; in which case she would 
have been eighty parts black and forty-eight parts 
white. Or she might have owed her existence to a 
union of griffonne with mulatto, or of marabout 
with marabout. 

But had marabout and griffonne combined in her 
creation, the percentages of black and white would 
have shifted ever so slightly, making Choucoune 
eighty-eight black to forty white, and that also 
would have been the percentage had she been pro- 
duced by the union of sacatra with mulatto. 

So through pages upon pages, St. Méry conscien- 
tiously classifies; detailing in turn the methods of 
creating quateron and mulatto, métif and mamelouc, 
sacatra and marabout; estimating their bewildering 
percentages of black and of white parts. 


Thus Choucoune was a marabout, 

With eyes like light, 

And firm little breasts. 

Ah, had Choucoune but been faithful! 

For long she and her lover had remained talking behind 
that great green tuft of Spanish-bayonet. 

Until even the birds in the wood had seemed glad. 

But it is better to forget that; it is too much pain; 

For since that day Choucoune’s lover has had two feet 
in a chain. 


The Flowered Shirt 107 


Jusqu’ zoézeaux lan bots té paraitr’ contents! .. . 
Pitdt blié ca: cé trop grand la peine. 
Car dempi jou-la, dé pieds moin lan chaine... . 


The little teeth of Choucoune were white like milk. 

And her mouth, the violet of the star-apple. 

She was not fat; she was only plump. 

And women like that pleased her lover at once. 

Ah, but the past is different from the present!.. . 

The little birds of the wood had seen them smile. 

If they remember, it must give them pain; 

For since that day Choucoune’s lover has had two feet 
inachain. . . 


P tits zoézeaux lan bois té oué nous souri; 
St yo songé ca, yo doué lan la peine, 
Car dempi jou-ld, dé pieds moin lan chaine... . 


They had gone together to the house of Choucoune’s 
mother. 

A very honest old person. 

As soon as she saw her daughter’s lover she had said, 

“Ah, I am very content of this gentleman!”’ 

They had then drunk chocolate made from nuts. 

And was that the end of it all, little birds of the wood? 

Better to forget that; it is too much pain; 

For since that day, Choucoune’s lover has had two feet 
in a.chain....). 


Est-ce tout ga fint, p’tits zoézeaux lan bois? 
Pitot blié ¢a; cé trop grand la peine, 
Car dempi jou-la, dé pieds moin lan chaine... . 


The furniture was ready; a pretty bed, 
Rattan chairs, a round table, and a rocking-chair, 


108 Black Haiti 


Mattress and a coat-peg, 

Tablecloth, napkins and muslin curtains. 

Only fifteen days remained. 

The little birds of the wood Choucoune’s lover implored 
to listen; 

For they would understand how he was in much pain, 

With, since that day, his two feet in a chain... . 


P’ tits zoézeaux lan bots, couté moin, couté! 
Z’autr’ tout va comprendr’ st moin lan la peine, 
Si dempi jou-la, dé pieds moin lan chaine.. . . 


And then upon the scene there had arrived a white man 

With a little red beard and a handsome rosy face. 

A fine man, with beautiful, straight hair. 

What pain was Choucoune’s lover to have because of 
him! 

He spoke French and Choucoune loved him. 

Better to forget that: it is too much pain. 

Choucoune left her lover with two feet ina chain... . 


Pitét blié ga; cé trop grand la peine. 
Choucoune quitié moin, dé pieds lan chaine. . . . 


But what was most sad in all that, 

What he thought would surprise the world, 

Was that in spite of all which had happened, 

He ever loved Choucoune! 

Choucoune was going to make a little quateron— 


And the exact Moreau de St. Méry long ago figured 
out that a quateron is composed of thirty-two to 
fifty-seven parts black and seventy-one to ninety- 
six parts white. He adds that it is the result of 





“ 
Choucoune.”’ 





_ The Flowered Shirt 109 


twenty combinations, one of which is the mating of a 
white with a marabout. 


Choucoune was going to make a baby quateron. 
Ah, but silence, little birds! It is too great pain! 
The two feet of Choucoune’s lover remain in achain. ... 


Pé, fémin bec 2’autr’, cé trop grand la peine, 
Dé pieds . . . dé pieds li lan chaine.. . . 


III 


Nearing the end of life Oswald declared his heart 
to be a tree, despoiled of its leaves by the winds of 
autumn. 

‘What of roses,’ he said, ‘‘What of roses have 
I not had? Roses which, like a butterfly, I have 
scarcely touched in passing! 

‘“‘Why could I not stop to enjoy the tenderness 
that leaned toward me?’’ 

His eyes had filled, but he swiftly recovered his 
poise; reflecting with that spiritual honesty so char- 
acteristic of him, that he had not after all been cre- 
ated for this bourgeois life; that obligations had 
always weighed upon him; even the claims of love 
he had felt to be heavy. 

And he had gone on to say that marriage he con- 
sidered was a stage—but a stage, where one paused 
for repose, before continuing on one’s way to taste 


110 Black Haiti 


all the rosy fruits of the roadside. In that repose 
of marriage he had three times thus paused; before 
going on to pluck the fruits of life. 

He was indeed that ‘‘Epicurean of the Renaissance, 
lost or straying in our streets, badly lit by petrol.”’ 
An Epicurean wearing a flowered shirt, of which surely 
the colors were like the soul which sang in Oswald, 
tropical and vivid. 


SIR SPENSER AND THE CONGO BEANS 


I 


It was years before Sir Spenser St. John permitted 
Congo beans to be served again at his table. And I 
could never eat them myself, never hear their dry 
little pods rustle in the breeze of Bizoton, without 
remembering why it was that more than sixty years 
ago Sir Spenser forbade them his table. 

Before going to Haiti the mere name of Bizoton 
instantly brought before me that whole extraordi- 
nary case, which Bellegarde calls the ‘‘affaire Tante 
Jeanne.” I had then no personal experience of 
sunny peace with which to endow Bizoton. I knew 
nothing of its association with Oswald Durand; the 
wistful refrain of the little birds hovering above 
Choucoune’s lover had not at that time sung them- 
selves into my heart. I knew only the affair of 
‘“Tante Jeanne,’ as it was long ago described by Sir 
Spenser. 

The thing had been so dramatic, so appalling, that 
it is easy to understand the powerful impression it 


DDE 


112 Black Haiti 


made upon the Britisher who had been present 
throughout the two days consumed in its trial. 
Although he lived for twelve years as his country’s 
Minister in Haiti, although he formed there many 
friendships, he seems never to have recovered from 
the horror of that impression. 

It was long before he could again eat Congo 
beans. 

And twenty years later, reading the report of some 
traveller in the West Indies, he is ready to credit the 
wildest rumors of cannibalism. The traveller’s 
tale, for example, declared that it was a common 
practice to exhume and devour corpses. Sir Spen- 
ser remembering ‘‘Tante Jeanne’’ shakes his head 
over the great increase in cannibalism since his 
day: for, he adds, ‘‘feeding upon exhumed corpses 
was not known during my residence.’ He shakes 
his head, but he believes. Although even he is 
doubtful that any Haitian voluntarily and seriously 
stated to a recording traveller that “‘human flesh 
was fine eating, for he’d tried it himself.”” Probably, 
Sir Spenser comments, the man was amused to test 
the extent of the traveller’s credulity. 

With this background of wide-spread rumor, it is 
not strange that my captain friend, going ashore for 
an hour or so, should have come away believing that 
only the lack of opportunity had prevented his 
heart’s being cut out and eaten. Such has been 


Sir Spenser and the Congo Beans 113 


the stigma that has persistently clung to Haiti. And 
in the story of ‘“‘Tante Jeanne”’ lies the grain of 
truth at the bottom of the cruelty of fantastic 
exaggeration. 


The slaves imported from Africa had come from 
the Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Coast of Angola 
and the Slave Coast; all the way from the Gulf of 
Guinea to the Cape of Good Hope. They represented 
most of the tribes of that dark and mysterious 
continent. 

some were said to be the descendants of Jews 
mixed with negroes. These were tall, well built 
men whose features had a Caucasian cast and whose 
language was clearly Semitic in character. Many 
had a Mohammedan tradition dating from the eighth 
century when Islam had invaded the Soudanese 
zone. Still others were the people of Dahomey; 
bringing to Haiti their belief in one supreme being 
called Mahon. Mahon had created the universe, 
and then set up between himself and his creatures 
a hierarchy of Voodoo spirits. And Mahon was 
materialized in the serpent. Of the Congos who 
came, some had been touched, not only by the influ- 
ence of Islam, but by the Catholicism of those 
Portuguese who were the first explorers of Africa. 

The new beliefs were grafted upon the pervading 
animism of the black, who felt himself to be ever 


114 Black Haiti 


surrounded by spirit; convinced that in all the forces 
of nature, in all beings filled with visible or latent 
life there existed a dynamic spirit, ‘‘capable of act- 
ing of and for itself.” 

These things were told me by my friend Dr. 
Price-Mars, as I sat stroking a polished almond- 
shaped stone which had once been an ax-head; 
belonging centuries ago to one of those aborigines 
who Columbus described as “‘so timid that a thou- 
sand of them would not oppose three of us . 
and thus very well fitted to be governed and set to 
work.’’ He thought they might even be taught to 
‘“‘wear clothes and to adopt our customs.”’ But the 
poor things had not lived to do much adopting of 
customs, or wearing of clothes, having been so 
thoroughly set to work by the Spaniards as to be 
soon exterminated by the cruelty of their labors. 

They had been replaced by those tribes from the 
Soudan, from Dahomey, from Senegal, and the 
Congo of which Dr. Price-Mars had been telling me, 
as I sat stroking the stone ax-head which was of so 
velvet a smoothness and so delicately slender a 
shape. 

Dr. Price-Mars was himself of an ebony unrelieved 
by any drop of white blood. A Haitian acquaint- 
ance had told me that he was the ‘‘direct descendant 
of an African Prince, and proud of it.’’ As such, 
he had thought much of all these matters, and he had 


Sir Spenser and the Congo Beans 115 


achieved not only knowledge, but a philosophy, full 
of humor and good will, in which there was appar- 
ently no shadow of prejudice. 

It was Dr. Price-Mars who taught me to see that, 
notwithstanding the fusion of tribes and of beliefs 
in Haiti, you may observe as you travel about the 
island that there are still distinct differences among 
the peasants. The powerful glossy black men and 
women who are of the Mohammedan traditions of 
north Africa are conspicuously different. In other 
types you may see here and there a tribe mark; 
and if you keep your eyes open, you may detect a 
Voodoo sign scrawled on a door; a Voodoo charm 
hung about a child’s neck; a dead fowl suspended 
in the foliage of a wayside bush. 

The stone ax-head lying all this time in my palm, 
Dr. Price-Mars used to make concrete the idea of 
animism. ‘‘The peasants,” he said, ‘“‘believe that 
a spirit lives in that stone. For this reason it was 
kept among the venerated objects on the altar of 
one of their Voodoo temples; kept beside a copy of 
the Catholic Bible.”’ 

This is the mosaic of Africa in Haiti; all the 
elements of that great shadowy Africa strangely 
transplanted to the little island which rises blue out 
of the sea; diverse peoples brought against their 
will and set down there, to make a new life in a far 
place. 


116 Black Haiti 


The Atlantic was for them a River Styx, over 
which they voyaged never to return. What it 
meant to them they came to express in proverbs. 
Their idea of ultimate distance was Guinea: while 
in their ‘‘Behind us, lies Guinea”’ is revealed a pro- 
found psychological truth of which they themselves 
seemed gropingly conscious. 

Behind them was Guinea, and as in that distant 
Guinea, there are certain cannibal tribes, it was 
inevitable that, along with everything else, the inher- 
itance of that custom also should have come to Haiti; 
inevitable that there should have been sporadic 
cases. That they could never have been frequent 
seems an equally logical deduction; for the French 
Colonials, having paid a high price for their slaves, 
would certainly not have tolerated their devouring 
each other! Cannibalism must therefore always 
have been extremely rare. Yet, that it ever occurred 
is the sorest spot for the Haitian in all his tragic 
history. Even Sir Spenser concedes their profound 
humiliation. 

Dr. Price-Mars did not allude to the subject of 
cannibalism but he made for me the background of 
that confused medley of tribal customs, of native and 
exotic faiths, so bewilderingly assembled in the 
island of Haiti. And into that background, canni- 
balism fitted, taking its place in a just proportion; 
without the distortion of exaggeration. 


Sir Spenser and the Congo Beans 117 


Sir Spenser St. John had had his training in Bor- 
neo under Sir James Brook, the first British Rajah 
of Sarawak. He must accordingly have been 
familiar with head-hunting, for in those days it was 
the outdoor sport of the Dyaks. Even now, in our 
own time, it is not entirely abolished, for I have sat 
often in the place of honor in a Dyak communal 
house; and the place of honor is under the cluster of 
dried and blackened human heads. While among 
our canoe-men was a gorgeous copper savage who 
but the previous week had ‘“‘taken’”’ four heads. He 
gave us a pantomime representation of his method. 

So, Sir Spenser must in his time, have played a 
part in the Rajah’s crusade to do away with head- 
hunting. But head-hunting seems not to have made 
upon him any deep and shuddering impression, such 
as that which led him years later to shake a cred- 
ulous head over the fantastic reports of the name- 
less traveller in Haiti. 

It is as though the negroes’ faculty of dramatiza- 
tion had reacted fatally against themselves; per- 
petuating and magnifying bizarre tales—tales of 
cannibals. 


IT 


The court sat in February. In Port-au-Prince 
that is the month when the countless yellow pods 
of the ftchia-ichia trees are rattling in the wind; 


118 Black Haiti 


when the flamboyant trees have shed their flaming 
blossoms; and just before the pendant green fruit 
of the mangoes have begun the golden alchemy of 
ripening. These things were the same in the year 
1925 as in that February of 1863 when, under the 
command of President Geffrard, the court sat to 
consider the case of ‘‘Tante Jeanne.” 

All who had been implicated in the affair were 
present; all, that is, except the child, Claircine. 

There was the man, Pellé, who, having been 
servant to a gentleman, had conceived the idea of 
rising in the world. There was Jeanne Pellé, his 
sister, known as ‘‘Tante Jeanne”; who was also a 
high priestess—a Mamaloi—in the Voodoo sect. 
And in the dock with them were the two Papalois, 
Julien Nicholas and Floréal Apollon. In their capac- 
ity of medicine-men of rank, both had been consulted 
by Jeanne concerning this serious problem of realizing 
for Pellé his ambitions. The lesser characters impli- 
cated were, Guerrier Francois, Neréide Francois, Bey- 
ard Prosper, and the young woman, Roséide Sumera. 

All were residents of the village of Bizoton; some 
had been house-servants to foreigners; others had 
been gardeners or washerwomen. 

To their trial in the criminal court there came Sir 
Spenser St. John; following the proceedings, as he 
says, ‘“‘in the most minute particulars.” 

This was a trial instigated, not by some shocked 


Sir Spenser and the Congo Beans 119 


foreigner like Sir James Brooke, with reform in his 
heart, but by the Haitians themselves. It was the 
Haitian police who had secured the evidence, and a 
Haitian Judge who presided over the court. Sir 
Spenser says that never had he been present at a 
case where a judge conducted himself with greater 
dignity and courage. Yet the rulers of Haiti were 
at that time but sixty years removed from slavery. 

And the tale of that which was laid bare in the 
court must be told, because without it this impres- 
sionist picture of Haiti would be incomplete. In 
the amazingly impartial history which Bellegarde 
has compiled for the children of Haiti he too has 
considered it necessary to include this case. His 
Petite Histoire D’Haits in its rose-colored paper 
cover is before me as I write. The lessons are 
arranged in catechism form. And here is question 
five, of the thirty-fourth lesson: 

“Que savez-vous de Vaffaire ‘tante Jeanne’?”’ 

The children reply, giving the outstanding details; 
and in their recitation the facts do not deviate from 
the story as it is related by Sir Spenser. 

‘On the heights of Bizoton,”’ the young voices are 
taught to reply, ‘‘there lived, in a solitude suitable 
to the practice of criminal customs, the family 
called Pellé. This ignorant family was addicted to 
those abominable forms of sorcery which lead often 
to cannibalism. . . . It is probable that these 


120 Black Haiti 


Pellés were descendants of the cannibal tribe of 
Mondongues. Of this family the two principal mem- 
bers were Jeanne and Pellé, her brother “ 

Thus the childish voices are instructed to relate 
the tale, Congo beans and all. 

It has thus been admitted to history. And yet 
it is as something more than history that it seems 
to me important. It is important because symbolic 
of the staggering difficulty of that problem which 
Fate has set for little Haiti. 

“Free yourselves!’ Fate commanded. 
‘What does it matter if France is great and power- 
ful, and you but a handful of slaves brought to- 
gether from all the tribes of old Africa?” 

And they had obeyed, making the impossible come 
true. 

‘Now, create a civilized nation’’—Fate is always 
thus insatiable—‘‘Create now a civilized nation.” 

‘Ah, but that is the supreme difficulty!”’ 

‘“‘No matter. Create . M 

It is of that effort that the case of ‘‘Tante Jeanne”’ 
is symbolic. And understanding it we can never 
again be guilty of what the Haitian writer Hannibal 
Price calls ‘‘achieving civilization . . . and then 
pulling the ladder up after us’’! 

With Sir Spenser, then, we listen to the story of 
the aspirations of Pellé, as they were recounted in 
the court, Pellé being thus possessed by ambition 





Sir Spenser and the Congo Beans 121 


and having consulted his sister, Jeanne, the priestess, 
and she, in turn, having conferred with the two 
Papalois, all had agreed that the loftiness of Pellé’s 
aims demanded sacrifice more important than that 
of a white cock or a white goat. 

It demanded the ‘‘goat without horns.’”’ And 
the little twelve-year-old Claircine, the niece of 
Pellé and of Jeanne, was selected as the victim. 

Sir Spenser writes that in the Haiti of those days, 
the French procedure was followed in the courts; 
witnesses being ‘“‘bullied, cajoled and cross-ques- 
tioned.”” Under this method every ghastly detail 
was brought out, to remain for so many years a 
horror in the mind of Sir Spenser. 

It began with that December morning in the dry 
season of the year 1863, under the Presidency of 
General Geffrard, when Jeanne had persuaded 
Claircine’s mother to go with her into Port-au- 
Prince; leaving the child at home with Pellé. 

The two women had, of course, walked along the 
sun-bright road from Bizoton to the Port; walking 
with the habitual easy erect grace of the Haitian 
peasant. Perhaps they had carried, perfectly bal- 
anced on their heads, baskets of fruit or vegetables 
to be sold in the market. But as the two sisters 
walked that road following the azure curve of the 
bay, of what could they have talked? What would 
Jeanne have had to say that morning to the mother 


122 Black Haiti 


of Claircine? Knowing, as she did, that Pellé had 
been left to decoy the little girl to the house of the 
Papalot, Julien, who was to take her to Floréal 
who would see that she was bound and hidden under 
the altar of a nearby Voodoo temple. 


The Port is fascinating to the women who gather 
for bargain and banter in the great market place in 
front of the Cathedral. It was therefore evening 
before Jeanne and the mother of Claircine returned 
to Bizoton. 

Where was Claircine? 

But Pellé did not know. She must, have wan- 
dered off somewhere. He helped to look for her. 
But no search revealed Claircine. It was thought 
therefore a good idea to consult a Papaloi; and the 
Papalot was consoling; he was convinced that there 
was no cause for anxiety. The Spirit of Water 
had merely temporarily borrowed Claircine, and 
would soon return her. Meanwhile it might 
hasten matters if they burned a few candles before 
some altar of the Virgin Mary. 

Four days later there was a great party at the 
house of ‘‘Tante Jeanne.” What took place at the 
party was told by the witnesses in that court where 
Sir Spenser sat listening. 

Claircine had been brought, gagged and bound 
from the temple. 


Sir Spenser and the Congo Beans 123 


Under the French procedure the witnesses had 
been induced to describe the sacrifice of the child. 
There was rumor of measures taken in prison to 
bring them to the point of confession. None had 
been at first willing to speak: all believing that if 
they kept faith, somehow the Voodoo would save 
them. But in court they had spoken; and when the 
negro speaks he clothes his tale with reality. 

Yes, the child had been sacrificed. Then, when all 
was over, and her flesh had been placed in large 
wooden dishes, the crowd had passed in procession 
to the house of Floréal. Jeanne had rung a 
little bell as signal, that with the victim’s head 
carried high, they were to march singing sacred 
songs. 


There had been two rooms in the house of Floréal. 
In one of the rooms there was sleeping a woman and 
a girl, The coming of the procession had waked 
them, and vising, they had peered through the 
crevices of the bamboo wall. 

What, the court inquired, had they seen, peering 
through the chinks in the wall? 

They’d seen Jeanne—‘‘Tante Jeanne.”” They saw 
her cooking something in a pot; cooking flesh with 
Congo beans. Into another pot they’d seen Floréal 
put the head together with some yams. He was 
making soup. 


124 Black Haiti 


When all had been examined and cross-examined, 
the court called to the stand, Roséide Sumera. 

Were these things true? 

Yes, Roséide had been present at the time. They 
were quite true. 

There in the court, Sir Spenser had heard her say 
this, while before him, on a table in front of the 
Judge, was Claircine’s skull, and in a jar the remains 
of the soup. 

Roséide described how when all was ready there 
had been drinking and dancing and feasting. Al- 
though the previous witnesses had proved beyond 
doubt the guilt of the prisoners, Roséide re-told 
the story from the moment of the sacrifice, omitting 
no detail; until the very cries of Claircine had 
seemed to echo in the court. 


Then it was all over. Sir Spenser heard the eight 
prisoners sentenced to be shot, as convicted of sor- 
cery, torture and murder. 

Up to that moment Jeanne had never lost her 
cool detached poise, but at the pronouncement she 
begged mercy. ‘‘Why,”’ she cried, ‘‘why should I 
be put to death for observing our ancient customs?”’ 


It was market day in Port-au-Prince in the Febru- 
ary of that year 1864. In the presence of the great 
Saturday market throng the prisoners had been 


Sir Spenser and the Congo Beans 125 


drawn in carts to the place of their execution. They 
had clothed them in the white robes of parricides; 
white robes and white head-dresses, out of which 
looked faces as dark as despair. 

But Sir Spenser was not of the throng which, in 
the cloudless sunlight of that long ago market day, 
looked upon the execution of the eight condemned 
prisoners. The details of that final scene he had 
from the American Commissioner. 

Seven of the eight, the Commissioner said, had 
remained silent to the end. Only Roséide had 
spoken, and she had chattered volubly and inces- 
santly with the crowd. 

Their courage had never faltered. They had not 
flinched. All had died without acry.... 

The Voodoo priests had announced that although 
the deity would permit the sentence to be carried 
out, he did so only that he might prove his power 
by raising all from the dead. The government 
accordingly placed troops that night about the 
graves, but in the morning the bodies of the two 
Papalois and of the priestess ‘‘Tante Jeanne’’ had 
disappeared. ‘Their graves stood open and empty. 


And because of these things it was years before 
Sir Spenser could again eat Congo beans. | 


THE SONG OF AFRICA 


I 


In Petit Godve the people with whom the mar- 
ket swarms, who ebb and flow in the long main thor- 
oughfare appear in the white light merely as brightly 
colored puppets; part of some sun-flooded spectacle, 
staged about the bluest of all the blue bays of all 
pageant worlds. Undoubtedly it is hot in Petit 
Goave, but you do not remember heat; you remem- 
ber only light; light of so intense a clarity that you 
see the surging life as purely objective. 

Occasionally little ships disturb the bay, com- 
ing in to take on a load of coffee with which they 
sailaway to Europe. ‘They leave the blue as smooth 
as though forgetful that any ship had ever caused 
it so much as aripple. The bay seems then, like 
the life of Petit Gove, to be possessed only of a shin- 
ing surface. 

One is conscious of no subjective profundities. 
Reality has slipped from life. Surely the oranges 


piled in golden heaps on the ground are but baubles, 
126 


The Song of Africa 127 


intended only to be looked at; and the great old- 
fashioned balanced scales, standing before certain of 
the houses, are only imitation scales to weigh imag- 
inary coffee. Even the short weight given is but 
part of the whole bright farce. 

Spread out on the street itself are rows upon rows 
of granite utensils for table and toilet. There, even 
granite-ware is of bizarre color, and the peasant can 
gratify a passion for rose or purple, green or blue. 
Under the projecting roofs of shops are displayed 
dress lengths of striped and flowered calicos, bolts 
of cheap lace, strings of beads, plaid squares for 
turbans, little mirrors where the light focuses in 
splashes. 

The Syrian shopkeepers are doing a brisk business, 
for this year there has been a boom in coffee. Up 
in the hills where the plants flourish, the peasants 
are prosperous this year. They come down to 
Petit Godve to sell their berries and to spend their 
money. On foot and on donkey they pour in; a 
bright stream which has its source in the hills. 

And because the price of coffee is high the peas- 
ants of the hills about Petit Goadve are marrying. 
Monseigneur, the Archbishop, is making his annual 
tour of the southern peninsula which Haiti sends out 
like a long arm to embrace the blue of the bay. 
Monseigneur rides on a mule over the mountains, 
and in Port-au-Prince, they say that if you have 


128 Black Haiti 


not seen him thus mounted and carrying an um- 
brella as sunshade, you have seen nothing. 

The large smooth presence of Monseigneur him- 
self was later to describe to us this tour of his spirit- 
ual domain. He was complacent for there had been 
quantities of marriages. He was a huge man with 
huge soft white hands. I could well picture him 
dominating his mule, as under the shade of the um- 
brella he rode dispensing the blessings of the Church. 

His tour, as it separated itself from his torrent of 
French and took on a color of its own, seemed as 
emotionless as the bright objectivity of Petit Godve. 
A revolution in Brazil had checked the coffee output 
of that country. Quite logically the price of our 
breakfast beverage had soared. And the peasants 
of the hills were indulging in the costly luxury of 
holy matrimony. It might even become so common 
as to cease to be, like a yacht or a Rolls-Royce, 
something to put on airs about! 

So throughout our day in Petit Godve did all life 
appear to be without depth under that gay sun which 
exaggerated the surface of things; shining with such 
a brilliance as to blind one to the existence of depths. 

In that mood I lunched with the French propri- 
etor of Petit Godve’s one big industry; and in that 
mood I listened to his explanations of the machin- 
ery which so cleverly sorted one quality of bean 
from another that it seemed positively more intel- 


The Song of Africa 129 


ligent even than the minds which had conceived 
it. 

In a dim shed women sat about on the floor re- 
volving the coffee in large round sieves; preparing it 
for the machines by separating the coffee beans 
from the dark and light pebbles with which it had 
been laboriously adulterated before selling it to the 
proprietor. As we stood in the doorway, looking on, 
they improvised a laughing song to request an in- 
crease of wages. But it was a jocular song. No- 
thing seemed to matter deeply; just as, if the price 
of coffee were high, you went through the churchly 
ceremony of marriage, while if the coffee market 
sagged, you didn’t bother with any such ostentation. 


II 


But in this Petit Godve of dazzling surfaces, Jules 
Dévieux was born nearly fifty years ago, and fif- 
teen years before the coffee plant had been built on 
the curve of the blue bay. 

Because of the glitter of the sun, we, who came 
in from the outside, could see only surfaces; but the 
eyes of Dévieux were from birth accustomed to 
the sight of Petit Godve in the white light. And 
from the depths of which he was part, he has made 
the song of Africa. He has written of the departure 
of the first shipment of slaves to the American 


130 Black Haiti 


islands. He has imagined—or perhaps it is a true 
story that he has written, handed down through 
the generations from torch-light to torch-light. 

He writes of a ship waiting on the shores of a sav- 
age land. Mcthers and fathers—too old for pur- 
chase—have gathered to embrace their children. 

And it is not entirely impossible that two of these 
children might have been the many times great 
grandparents of Jules Dévieux. 

The land, he writes, was savage like those who 
inhabited it, but somehow it was loved; somehow it 
was blessed to them. He pictures scenes of despair 
on the shores of that land, pictures the air torn with 
wailing. 

He imagines):. .or shad the tale \of it’ been 
repeated through four hundred years? He imag- 
ines that when the air was so rent with despair, the 
new masters, becoming impatient, had ordered the 
young to be torn from the old. But before parting 
there had been whispered those things which were 
not to be forgotten, however distant might be the 
country of exile. 

It would be necessary, for example, to think often 
of old Africa, of the good land of their birth, where 
they had grown up in the communion of the waters. 
In the rare leisure of their enslavement they must 
gaze toward the country of their origin, where they 
would be ever mourned. And should the sweets of 


The Song of Africa 131 


a new existence enchant them and threaten to win 
them entirely to love of the new land, they would 
have only to remember the songs which had cradled 
them. However far the exile might be, they must 
communicate with Africa, and the tutelary gods 
would protect them; the Spirits of River and Forest 
and Fire; the Spirits latent in all created things. 


This the god had said when at the fall of day, on 
the eve of that first departure, the fathers and 
mothers had gone to consult him. 

The god said that Africa was not to be broken, 
not to be annihilated, but that she would re-live, 
there where the expedition was to come to an end. 
She would be young and strong and more invin- 
cible. For what after all mattered the place where 
the children were going to create a new country! 
The spirit of their own primitive land—of bloody and 
idolatrous Africa—would still look down upon the 
people of whom the fathers and the mothers were 
on the morrow to leave its shores. 

On the altar, from which emanated this voice, 
there was then a sudden silence; followed by sin- 
ister laughter... . 

The god continued. 

“They think to be able to destroy us... . Our 
continent is violated... . But I swear to you that 
Africa will survive.” 


132 Black Haiti 


Again there was silence and groans echoed in the 
temple, as if the god himself suffered strangely and 
was all at once overcome by a vision of inevitable 
disasters . . . by a revelation of the terrible events 
to take place in that new land, for which the chil- 
dren of Africa were leaving. 

And the voice broke the silence, crying ‘“‘Pity! 
er ity Li 

There was nothing more. 


The mothers trembled, prostrate beneath the furi- 
ous wing-beats of the Spirit. The fathers mut- 
tered prayers. But none moved. It was as though 
they had been held by invisible prophetic chains. 
That lasted long, until an old chief tottered on uncer- 
tain limbs toward the beach; followed by a second, 
with bent back and white beard covering the night 
of his face. Thus one by one, until none of the 
terrified throng remained. 


On the beach, it was the hour of eternal separation 
the hour of last embraces; the beginning of tears; 
the hour also of confidences, of whispered words of 
those things which were not to be forgotten. 

The children listened, and embarked. 


From the shores, under the star-studded sky, there 
sounded dully, as though muffled in crépe, the long 
drums which beat accompaniment to the voices of 


The Song of Africa 133 


those negroes who were left behind, of those negroes 
physically pronounced unfit for the stern demands 
of slavery. 

In the night the sails were hoisted and the little 
caravel pulled up anchor. 

The fires along the shore then grew small and at 
last disappeared. 

On board there was sorrow—mortal sorrow— 
among the negroes. Only faintly could be distin- 
guished the melancholy mourning of the drums 
which for the last time saluted those sons of Africa, 
bound on the caprice of the winds to strange dis- 
tant islands. Thus they left, rocked by the refrain 
of those songs to the music of which they had been 
born. 


But the children never forgot the things which had 
been whispered to them. Of that Dévieux is cer- 
tain. Also he is certain that from time to time 
Africa calls them. It is then that they are sad, 
that they feel themselves possessed by strange mal- 
adies; called by far lands... by countries never 
visited, but seen only in dreams. 

‘‘“There comes an hour,’’ Dévieux declares, ‘‘ when 
the Africa which sleeps in each one of us awakes 

..inspiring us with mad ideas, producing in 
us sudden voids which nothing can fill. 

‘“Then it is that we remember the songs, the 


134 Black Haiti 


sad songs of bloody and idolatrous Africa. We 
remember in the silence of starry nights. The 
drums mourn then, with that heavy moan which is 
the translation of the unrest of an orphan people; 
brutally torn from the cradle of their race, to popu- 
late lands where the aborigines had died, crushed 
and exterminated by the cruelty of the labor im- 
posed upon them.”’ 

Through the centuries of slavery there would be 
heard at night the far, hardly to be distinguished 
call of the drums; lamenting in the distance; or 
sounding the three notes, repeated at regular inter- 
vals, which announced their nocturnal reunions. 
The slave negro, says another Haitian writer, lived 
an interior life, the more intense because it had to 
be secret: at night, to .the homesick sound of the 
tambour, the suppressed personality would emerge. 


And in the silence of starry nights, it is easy to 
remember past existences—impossible to forget. 


III 


In Petit Goave the sunshine is of so intense a 
clarity that the life surging in the streets is seen as 
purely objective. Surely the oranges in their 
golden heaps are but baubles, and the great bal- 
anced scales, so out of proportion to the tiny houses 





In Petit Godve the sunshine 1s of so in- 
tense a clarity that the life surging in 
the streets is seenas purely objective. 


Oy a ‘ eas 7 


v 


oe 
or ae ys 
rive 
aa 





The Song of Africa 135 


before which they stand, these are but the semblance 
of scales, designed to weigh fictitious coffee. So 
does the gay sun blind one to realities, burlesquing 
even the surfaces, and obliterating the depths; 
denying that there are profundities where still lives 
the song of Africa. 


INTO THE INTERIOR 


IT was in the valley of Mirebalais that there came 
along the road ahead of us a Voice. It echoed to 
the hills and was thrown back again to the road. 
There were three peasants at the turn of the road. 
It must be one of them who spoke, haranguing the 
others, for the voice was raised in a rhetorical mono- 
logue. The peasants approached, and as_ they 
drew near to where we had paused for lunch under 
the shade of a flowering mimosa, we saw to our 
amazement that they walked in silence, whereas 
the reverberant voice continued. The peasants 
reached us, we exchanged ‘‘bon-jours’’ and they 
passed on. Then at last around the distant turn of 
the road there came walking very slowly a bare- 
headed man, in blue cotton trousers, with his blue 
coat removed and carried over one shoulder, leaving 
his brown body to glisten moistly under an all-per- 
vasive penetrating sunshine. As he came he walked 
from side to side of the road, declaiming in that 
resonant voice which had come to us for long before 
the man himself had been visible. He spoke in 

136 


Into the Interior 137 


beautiful French and with a profound pathos, not 
always coherent but always moving, as though he 
gave utterance to overwhelming sorrow, a sorrow 
which took him restlessly from side to side of the 
road under the blazing sun. 

It was all about some family—his family—who had 
lived in the village of Croix-des-Bouquets near to 
Port-au-Prince. There had been a mother with a 
dazzling crown and a father who had spoken ‘‘too 
fast.’’ At times in the monologue he would pause 
to smile with a touching tenderness and stoop to 
stroke some tiny non-existent creature, perhaps the 
child he had himself once been. At other times 
he would pass his hand thoughtfully over his head 
as though he tried to remember something, to clear 
up something which always evaded him; and then 
again he would put his forefinger beside his nose in | 
that characteristic French gesture without which 
no French actor could possibly appear on the stage. 
And sometimes he would interrupt the tale of that 
family who had lived in the Village of the Cross-of- 
Bouquets, to declare to the echoing hills that he 
was not a ‘‘fou,’” not crazy, but sane, and the mem- 
ber of a fine family, who must be cared for, who must 
have the best and who had lived in the village 
Olean 

A woman appeared, evidently come in search of 
him. She made signs to indicate to us that he was 


138 Black Haiti 


not quite all right. She urged him to go along, 
remonstrated with him because he walked uncov- 
ered in the sun which was not good for his head. 
But, he vowed, he would not go out of the sun to 
please her, but to please us. Wishing to give him 
something, we offered a coin which the woman 
stepped forward to receive, but he would not accept 
it from her, it was not for her, he would take it 
only from us, and he would walk on his knees to 
receive it. Thus, indeed, he crossed the road on 
his knees, and bowed his bearded face to kiss the 
dirt in thanks. 

And then we left him to resume his serpentine 
way back and forth while again he told his story to 
the hills. 


At Mirebalais we had entered what was once 
brigand—Cacos—country. And at Hinche where 
we were to spend the night we would be in the 
heart of what had been their territory, their strong- 
hold ever since the days when high-spirited slaves 
like Dessalines had escaped to become fierce nomads 
of the hills in this country whose very geography, 
as well as its tragic history, has contributed to brig- 
andage. Men fled from tyranny into the isolation 
of the waiting hills, from which it was possible to 
make swift raids upon the fertile valleys which in 
Haiti separate the ranges; possible to swoop down 


Into the Interior 139 


to sack the farms of the Cul-de-sac, the Artibonite, 
the northern plain, and of the many lesser valleys. 
It was the cheerful custom of these bandits to raid 
the caravans of market women; attacking them, on 
the way to market if they desired provisions, and 
on the way back if it was money they needed. 

By valleys and dividing hills, climbing and descend- 
ing, fording brooks and rivers, we came to Las 
Cahobas, where we were glad to stop in the shade of 
the Gendarmerie Captain’s bungalow. ‘There we 
heard first-hand talk of life in the hill-country; talk 
of the old Haitian General at Savanette who has five 
thousand tenants and who rules them and Sava- 
nette, all for what he deems their good and the 
good of Haiti. This old General who counts himself 
worth nearly a million'in gold and boasts that he 
spends neither his time nor his money in Paris, un- 
like so many of the wealthy among his country- 
men. 

There was a pale little wife at this bungalow. 
Just now her mother-in-law was visiting them and 
was ‘‘quite a bit of company.’’ Otherwise she was 
alone, although there were, now that the new road 
was opened, often people going through on business 
to Hinche, and sometimes they stopped over at 
the bungalow. Like many exiles, especially exiled 
women, this girl had an infinitely detached way of 
talking about her environment. You felt that it 


140 Black Haiti 


seemed unreal to her and that she spoke of it much 
as she might have alluded to the vague details of a 
dream. I am sure that in her mind, etched in 
exact detail, were the streets and shops and moving- 
picture houses of some little town in the States, a 
town inhabited by the only real people there were 
in the world. The things that I questioned her 
about were surely some silly sort of dream. Even 
the pretty little blue-and-green parrot, Jocko, which 
she brought in to show, might prove to be but the 
bird of an hallucination. She thought a good deal 
about Voodoo. Her laundress was a Hounga- 
woman—a sorceress. She had just got three months 
in jail for taking five gourdes from a woman who had 
come to consult her as to how to make money. 
The Hounga-woman had told her to go home and 
dig in a certain spot in her door-yard. But of 
course nothing was there, and the victim defied the 
rage of the sorceress by carrying her complaint to the 
Gendarmerie. The Hounga was promptly con- 
victed, and condemned to the ignoble cutting of 
weeds along the roads—an occupation which en- 
tirely destroyed her prestige. 

With the opening a year ago of the road from Las 
Cahobas to Hinche, another stretch was added to the 
seven hundred and fifty miles of highway. Until the 
reconstruction of the road system ten years ago, no 
wheeled vehicles had traversed the interior of Haiti 


Into the Interior 141 


for a hundred and twelve years; not since the flour- 
ishing days when the slaves of the French were driven 
to keep in repair avenues of transportation. And 
as Haitian railroads are still negligible fragments 
without curiosity about the interior, all of Haiti 
save its coast line has been a sealed mystery about 
which lurid misrepresentation has played. 

A thousand men, the marine boys told us, had 
worked on this new road to Hinche, and while they 
worked they sang and kept the rhythm by striking 
their picks together. 

It was a high road, with hills rippling and rolling 
away on either side to the mountain horizon, and 
above it the sky was gold with hovering rose clouds, 
which turned swiftly into fuschia. And then hur- 
riedly night had come and powdered the sky with 
stars which hung low over this road into the strong- 
hold of brigands, now dead. 

At Hinche a woman in white waited with an elec- 
tric pocket flash to welcome us, to show us into a 
tiny guest house of two rooms where candles burned. 
And in her bored cultivated voice there was a qual- 
ity which took me suddenly back to a hill-station in 
India, to Mundali, beyond Musoorie on the way 
to Simla, where I had long ago been greeted by an- 
other white woman, also exiled from her proper 
setting, also a woman into whose voice had crept a 
weary rebellion. And to this woman of the world 


142 Black Haiti 


who waited with the electric flash at Hinche, all 
that was distasteful in her surroundings seemed 
acutely real and about to become unbearable; quite 
unlike the vaguely inarticulate detachment of the 
pale little wife at Las Cahobas. 

Foreigners in the port towns, with their clubs and 
their dances and their tennis, know nothing of this 
hill life, for which one must be born; born with in- 
herent love of wide lonely places and of primitive 
people, qualities that cannot be cultivated. 

And Hinche is lonely, notwithstanding the new 
road. In the season of rains the little group of 
half a dozen white people living there are often 
cut off for weeks. Rivers rise to a height unford- 
able even by the experienced traveller in Haiti who 
thinks nothing of a crossing which demands that his 
carburetor be removed and his machine pulled 
through by native man-power with ropes. But 
when the current would reach the top of the car, 
even he then concedes that travel is for the time 
being out of the question. For weeks at a time 
Hinche is thus isolated. Also in the dry months if 
there is unusual rain in the higher hills the rivers 
rise with amazing speed. A certain river twice 
crosses the road between Las Cahobas and Hinche. 
And it often happens that after having safely accom- 
plished the first ford you may find that the second, 
distant not more than a half hour’s run, has risen 


Into the Interior 143 


beyond the fordable depth. And there you are 
caught between the two, for by that time it is no 
longer possible to recross the first. And you must 
wait for the subsiding of the stream, or deserting 
your motor, take to the water yourself. 

In these periods of isolation only the airplane 
links Hinche with the world. The twice-a-week 
plane from Port-au-Prince to Cape Haitian makes a 
landing at Hinche, delivering mail but carrying no 
passengers except an occasional Marine Corps Offi- 
cer on business; none, that is, unless some white 
man or woman, desperately ill with the fever, be 
rushed to the Port by air. 

We saw the plane come in on the morning after 
our night in the guest house. A native funeral had 
just passed over the high savanna, on its way down 
from the hills to the little chapel. The coffin had 
been carried on the heads of four men, and they, as 
well as the group of mourners, had moved with little 
wavy dancing steps, in order that the evil spirits 
which follow the dead should be, misled and unable 
to find their way. The funeral had passed from 
sight, leaving the broad plateau quite deserted, 
until there came the great overhead whirring and the 
sudden swift dropping to the landing field, dropping 
down to an eager expectant group of exiles gazing 
fascinated upward. 

It was not mail day, they explained, but still 


144 Black Haiti 


there might be papers which came often on the later 
machine, and there was always a chance that there 
might even be a letter which had been overlooked 
in the first sorting. Then of course there were the 
aviators, with a moment to spare for the delivery of 
any news of the Port. “So,” the waiting group 
confided, ‘‘the plane never fails to excite us.”’ 

And when, like a vast insect, it teetered uncer- 
tainly over the field, ran along, lifted, and was gone, 
it left Hinche once more very still among its bandit 
hills, as still as though there had been no plane. 

It was then that we walked to call on the rosy 
baby who was the delight of the Station, and then 
that we were shown the snake that had that morn- 
ing been found in her room. There was also the 
Colonel’s Squash court to be inspected, and the 
hospital under construction, the first hospital ever 
seen in the interior of Haiti. The hill people will 
with misgiving at first experiment with this, the 
white man’s Voodoo, adding its practice to that of 
their own medicine-men and women, as they have 
added Catholicism to Voodoo. There will be in 
the beginning inevitably some bewilderment as on 
the week before our arrival, when a native had 
died after the amputation of his arm by the white 
man’s doctor. All night the medicine-man, the 
Papaloi had prowled around the house, moaning, 
‘‘Le Blanc coupé lil Le Blanc coupé li!’’ It was 


Into the Interior 145 


quite true, of course, that the ‘‘white man had cut 
him,” but who could make the puzzled primitive 
brain understand that the man had been brought 
in too late and that the doctor had taken the only 
chance there was to save him? 

“Did you hear anything?” said the Colonel to 
his house-boy the next day. ‘“‘Then why did you 
not go out to see who it was walking around the 
house and talking? JI expect you to look out for 
the place when I am away.”’ 

‘“There was a noise,’’ replied the boy, ‘‘and it was 
a demon.”’ 

‘“What makes you think it was a demon?”’ 

‘‘Because there was a noise, and when I went to 
see, there wasnoone there. And so it was a demon.”’ 

Thus the first hospital in the interior will have 
slowly to win its way among the people of the hills, 
as along the coast the clinics have won confidence. 

It was while watching the gendarmes drill in front 
of the barracks at Hinche that I heard one of the 
many stories of the ‘“‘boys who did the job.” 

It had happened in a little white house at the 
corner of the parade grounds. A little house with a 
blue door and blue windows. A Major had lived 
there, for it was in the early days of the Occupation, 
before the building of any quarters for the staff. 
And it was in the time of the Caco uprising, when the 
hills had been full of bandits. The Major had had 


146 Black Haiti 


a negro cook whose devotion he’d earned. This 
old negress warned him that on a certain night the 
Cacos would come. But as there was then always 
some sort of rumor going about Hinche, the Major 
paid no attention. That is how I understood it 
had happened that the Major was alone when the 
brigands attacked. All at once he realized that the 
house was surrounded. He had by him two rifles, 
and while he emptied the contents of one, old Anna, 
the cook, loaded the other and handed it to him. 
Firing and loading and firing and re-loading. That 
went on for an hour before relief arrived. And Anna 
became the heroine of the Marines. They gave her 
a free pass to the Marine Corps moving-picture house 
in Cape Haitian. And there when Anna is in town 
she may still be seen taking her place like a queen 
among the khaki boys and their best girls. 


The road out of Hinche to San Michel leads 
through yellow flowering mimosas, where little goats, 
yoked that they may not stray too far from home, 
bound like living rocking-horses away from our 
car, dashing into the undergrowth and then com- 
ing cautiously back again to the road. And below 
the level of the mimosas are tropical valleys, valleys 
deeply green with mango trees and banana and sugar- 
cane, valleys from which tall royal palms lift high 
peering heads, valleys at the bottom of which we 


Into the Interior 147 


had almost always to ford some stream. But we 
had to be nervous about none except the Canot 
River. If we crossed that safely there would be no 
trouble about getting to San Michel. The Canot 
was the big river, where we were to be sure to re- 
member to pass by the right. But there had been 
no rain in the hills, for we found the Canot in a 
lamb-like mood, with cattle being driven across it, 
returning with their new owners from the market 
at Maissade where they had been purchased; and 
in mid-stream was a small boy giving his puppy a 
bath at the same time that he filled the water-jars 
on the back of his donkey. 

Beyond the Canot is the high broad savanna of 
Diane, a plain to which the road leads up from the 
tropical valley of the river. There the road practi- 
cally disappears, leaving only what a Haitian friend 
called ‘‘its traces.’’ Following these traces we 
drove through a sea of grass, blown into waves by a 
soft strong breeze. Across the plain there came to 
us the voices of peasants who followed the little 
paths which led through wavy grass to their homes. 
The low sunlight glinted on the undulating surface. 
Haiti was very tranquil... . 

With every mile that we had advanced into the in- 
terior our surprise at the beauty of the country had 
increased. Yet since the glowing letters written by 
Columbus to his sovereign patrons, travellers have 


148 Black Haiti 


almost without exception ignored that beauty. 
Writers of the Colonial period stress the wealth of 
the island; those who describe the bitter struggle of 
the slaves for their freedom emphasize massacre and 
torture, while the hundred subsequent years are pic- 
tured as a saga of half tragic, half comic revolution- 
ary politics. 

And the loveliness of Haiti is so extraordinarily 
out of key with the cruel horror of its history. In 
the austere beauty of the Andes it is easy to visual- 
ize the Conquest, but in the soft loveliness of Haiti’s 
tumbled hills and verdant valleys her history has a 
trick of slipping out of the scene. 

So upon the road from San Michel to Ennery the 
past became for the moment a blank. It was as 
though nothing had ever happened in the tropical 
valley—nothing but the mating of flocks of chatter- 
ing parrots, the perfumed flowering and the golden 
fruiting of miles of oranges growing wild among the 
great green mangoes and the stately mahogany 
trees. While enveloping all was hot dry sunshine. 

The way up from Ennery is beauty of another 
sort; more sophisticated beauty, for on that steeply 
climbing road one soon leaves behind the luxuri- 
ance of the valleys and passes up into a region where 
subtle beauty lies in the translucent veil of light, 
enveloping bare yellowed hills and hills of upstand- 
ing white rock, like the ruins of long deserted castles. 


Into the Interior 149 


Up and around these hills there twists and scallops the 
blinding limestone road, and among the rocks grow 
exquisite flowers of clear pure pink, each flower on 
its own ten-inch stem, and each as fresh and lovely 
as though it had grown by the side of some sparkling 
brook. ‘There are great orange puff-balls on the tall 
swaying stalks of the aloes, while tiny scented yel- 
low blossoms grow everywhere between the rocks 
and with the mounting altitude occasional pines 
appear. 

The highest point of the road is the divide between 
the valleys of Ennery and of Plaisance. There, far 
below on the left, lies the great blue horse-shoe of 
the bay of Gonaives, while to the right, across the 
valley of Plaisance, the Atlantic rolls in and breaks 
on the shore of Haiti’s northern peninsula. 

None of the valleys of Haiti is quite so delightful 
as this of Plaisance; green with the plumes of bam- 
boo and giant ferns, fragrant with acres of blossom- 
ing coffee growing under a rustling canopy of ba- 
nanas, brilliant with patches of wild geranium and 
lonely aristocratic fuchias, while every orange tree 
is decorated with fruit, like little softly glowing Chi- 
nese lanterns hung among the dark foliage. 

Nearly a hundred years ago an old writing chap 
recommended to me Plaisance. And to the aston- 
ishment of everyone I had talked about the place 
from the moment of my arrival in Haiti. 


150 Black Haiti 


‘‘Plaisance,” they said, ‘‘there is nothing at 
Plaisance.” 

‘‘Oh, yes,” another put in, ‘‘there is a Rest House 
where they can spend the night.” 

‘‘T don’t remember any Rest House.”’ 

“Up on the hill, about three miles from the vil- 
lage. It belongs to the gendarmes. A man named 
Watson had it built. There’s an old watchman in 
charge. But they’ll have to take their own pro- 
visions.” 

It was to this Rest House that we journeyed 
through the valley of pleasure, where all was as my 
friend of the old book had said, lovely and at peace. 

Recently in one of those ‘‘Oh, did you go there 
and see so and so?”’ conversations, a friend ques- 
tioned, ‘‘And is Plaisance as charming as ever? I 
was there fifteen years ago. And did you meet the 
priest? J remember the priest with all the puppies!” 

No, I had not happened to meet the priest, and as 
for the puppies, how puppies can beget their kind 
and age and pass on into other incarnations in fif- 
teen years! 

But Plaisance is the same, except that my friend 
had to reach it on horseback, while I was able to 
arrive on tires. | 

I remember it as a pink village with brown thatch 
roofs. There are big rose bushes covered with pink 
roses to match the walls of the houses, and of course 


Into the Interior 151 


there are bananas and palms and bread-fruit trees, 
oranges and mangoes. And I remember that it was 
Saturday afternoon, that everyone seemed in festive 
mood, and that the children waved and danced at 
sight of our car, and every doorway smiled and 
bowed a greeting, as we whirled through the village 
and up over the terra cotta colored road to the 
Rest House where ‘‘they,’’ we had been told, might 
spend the night. 

Such is the sinister Haiti of distorted tales of 
cannibalism, of the inflated myth of the ‘‘goat with- 
out horns,’’ of the hatred of black for white, of the 
importance of going armed, and—supreme absurd- 
ity—the necessity of keeping padlocked one’s flask 
of drinking water to make sure that one is not pois- 
oned with some mysterious and deadly herb! Asa 
Haitian writer has said, the credulity of those who 
credit this sort of stuff is only equalled by that of 
the peasant’s belief in his Voodoo charms. 


It requires always an effort to reconcile the Hai- 
tian negro of the day with the Haitian negro of the 
night. At night, as Price-Mars has said, the slave 
negro lived that interior life which was the more 
intense because it was necessarily secret. And, as 
though it were still true that only then may sup- 
pressed personalities emerge, the Haitian peasant of 
daylight seems quite another fellow from what he 


152 Black Haiti 


appears under the moon. I found it impossible, for 
example, to believe that Justin, the tall negro who 
brought in morning coffee at the pension, could ever 
shed his dignity and dance with abandon to the bar- 
baric pulsing of drums. Or that the black giantess, 
Frasilia, who solemnly flourished the pension broom, 
might by night lead a wild chorus. And never was 
this difference between exteriors and interiors more 
striking than at the Rest House of Plaisance. 

The wind blows about that Rest House, whipping 
the long pendant leaves of the bananas which edged 
the clearing. The Haitians call the banana plant 
the woman of the wind, because ‘‘aussitot qu’il 
souffle, elle se couche.” But the bananas of the Rest 
House do not prostrate themselves at the first gust 
of the masculine wind; they are sturdy women who 
hold themselves erect though the wind flays to tat- 
ters their leaves. 

Like a red and yellow bird the house among these 
bananas perches on the hilltop overlooking the 
charming valley upon whose cultivated fields and 
wooded slopes the low sun sketches areas of pale 
green, while from hill-top to hill-top the wind rushes 
and recedes, like waves whose ebb never quite dies 
away. | 

The Rest House keeper’s family is busy making 
ready the house; bringing water and wood, opening 
windows and doors, and shifting the position of dust. 


Into the Interior 153 


They are negroes of the peasant class. If they 
have any white blood it would take an expert to 
detect it; to the average observer they are typical. 

And then night falls. At seven o’clock it is 
midnight dark. The wind has increased, blowing 
fast and strong. It brings to the hill-top the song 
of thatched huts; not this time the sensuous chorus 
of the dance, nor the rhythm by which Haitians toil, 
but a song of pure beauty, of pain made beauty. 

The old Rest House keeper has confided that on 
Tuesday he had ‘‘a loss’’—his wife: and all the men 
of his clan have black bands fastened with safety 
pins about their arms, while all the women wear 
black cotton frocks and white turbans. ‘There has 
been a loss, and for the sorrow which is in the world 
men and women comfort each other in song: the 
male voices singing alone, until suddenly a soprano 
chorus bursts from the women, and then as sud- 
denly ceases; as though women would listen again 
to the deep hearts of men. And the singers are 
those who have brought water and wood and who 
have swept the Rest House floor. 


Haiti is poor; there are statistics, but you do not 
need them; you may observe the fact for yourself. 

You have only to see a housewife carrying home 
from one of the many wayside stalls, her day’s 
marketing—a single dried smoked fish, not more than 


154 Black Haiti 


six inches long. She will boil the fish with rice and 
Congo beans. And the lord of the house will have 
the fish, the family contenting themselves with the 
flavor which it has imparted to the rice and the 
beans. 

There are of course yams and cassava, bananas 
and oranges. You need never starve in Haiti, but 
you can easily be chronically sufficiently under- 
nourished to take the edge off vitality. 

Haiti is so poor that everything is marketable— 
every scrap of newspaper, every discarded bottle or 
tin. And for its economic betterment the Occupa- 
tion has ideas. 

There is disease as well as poverty in Haiti; the 
Sanitary Department is improving health condi- 
tions, alleviating suffering. Haiti lacked roads, and 
now it is possible to motor from the southern prov- 
ince to the northern. But Haiti has song in its 
heart; and no matter how desirable the gifts we 
bring, they are worthless in comparison: it is all 
important that Americanization should stop with 
order and science; it must not stifle the song in 
hearts that yet remember how to set life to music. 
For that is their priceless gift. 

No other race has created a joyous heaven. Lis- 
tening to the song which the wind brings to the Rest 
House, I recall our own swinging low of sweet char- 
iots; the wings with which one may fly over God’s 


Into the Interior 155 


heaven; and how the ‘‘chillun”’ will shout all over 
that heaven which they have made so merry and 
triumphant a place. 

I do not know the words borne by the wind to this 
Rest House of Plaisance, but their beauty needs no 
defining. Perhaps the singers themselves do not 
comprehend; for many of the songs of Haiti have 
African words, whose significance has been lost in 
the passing of generations. 

And listening, it seems impossible that the singers 
will be by day but men and women; cast in the 
familiar Ethiopian. mould; teakwood people with 
ivory for teeth and for the whites of their eyes. 

But I know that in the morning, when the light 
has strayed in through the wooden shutters and the 
loosely-hung doors, they will come to kindle the cook- 
house fire, to inspect once more our curious posses- 
sions, and to exhibit babies turbaned in their best 
and gayest handkerchiefs, and wearing Voodoo 
charms and necklaces about their chubby necks. 

And all will appear merely as nice friendly peas- 
ants, rather than as divine singers. 


Four LIEUTENANTS, AND THE PRISONER WHG 
DRUMMED 


I 


LIEUTENANT NUMBER ONE. ‘The man on the hill- 
top was tall and lank. The khaki of his Marine 
Corps uniform was frayed with much beating by 
negro laundresses upon the stones of the river. The 
sun had taken the color out of it, as it had faded his 
tawny hair; and then given back to his face and his 
neck and his hands all that stolen red and tan. 
While for the lean muscular body, his active life 
was of course responsible. This was the outward 
semblance which is, as it were, the cocoon of the ego. 

Standing beside him on the hilltop, the first 
impression of that imprisoned entity to get across to 
me was the intuitive conviction that it was experi- 
enced, resourceful, and adequate. We stood among 
the shadeless ruins of the fort of La Créte-a-Pierrot. 
The sun was hot and dry and clear; parchingly dry 
and blindingly clear, like the sun on the plains of 


central India. 
156 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 157 


“In heat like this,’’ I gasped, “‘I don’t see how 
anybody ever had the pep to attack or defend a 
fOr, 

All the bloody history of the Créte-a-Pierrot was 
shimmering for me in the quivering light. I tried to 
steady and to reduce to accurate outlines that 
blurred past. 

It had been more than a hundred years ago, at 
the time when Napoleon had sent to Haiti a force 
of twenty thousand under command of his brother- 
in-law, Leclerc. And Leclerc would capture the 
Créte because it dominated the range of hills where he 
believed the negroes had concealed great treasure 
and quantities of munitions. But Dessalines held 
the Créte. 

This skeleton of the story came back. 

Twice the French had been repulsed, and a third 
time they gathered for assault. It was then that 
Dessalines had shouted: ‘‘I wish to have remain here 
with me only the brave. Let those who are willing 
to become again slaves, leave the fort!” 

That was an appeal which with slaves never failed. 
Inevitably all would die for liberty. In this spirit 
they had begun the thirteen days of their resistance 
to incessant cannonade. 

In my vision of the battle Marie-Jeanne is always 
the young and pretty mulatress with her own sabre 
and her own gun swung over one shoulder; those 


158 Black Haiti 


stern weapons challenging the dark heavy curls 
escaping from under her cap. 

She is always in love with the officer, Lamartin- 
iére, and he with her. According to tradition it is 
for love that she is fearless under the rain of mis- 
siles, and for love that her own aim is sure. And 
yet, it must have been for a deeper urge that she 
bore a part in the defense of the Créte; she must 
have been impelled by the necessity to achieve. 

It was thus that I fancied her among the twelve 
hundred men crowded into the suffocating space of 
the fort, where man after man was falling dead or 
wounded, until five hundred of them lay under the 
burning sun. 

But they were valliant. I could not see them 
other than valiant, those men who fought for lib- 
erty; not for some vague lovely catchword of lib- 
erty, nor for lofty freedom of speech, of thought or 
of worship; they fought for actual physical liberty, 
the stark liberty of their bodies. 

So the fight was heroic to the end: to the final 
day of the evacuation when the seven hundred men 
who remained had cut a bloody path through the 
besieging French troops who had at last starved them 
out of food and water and munitions. 

The scene made a sort of picture that artists of a 
past generation adored to paint; smoke and rushing 
men, lifted swords, and prostrate bodies, blood and 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 159 


death, with dominating all a militant young woman, 
another of the immortal Jeanne d’Arcs, who some- 
how accentuate and glorify their sex by defying it; 
strange women always amazingly loved. 

In such an imagined picture of the siege of the 
Créte-a-Pierrot, there was the added quality of power- 
ful contrast, in that the men who defended were 
black, while those bombarding were white. 


But the vision of the terrible canvas was suddenly 
erased. For the tall lean man on the hilltop had 
begun to speak. 

“All this,” he was saying, “‘is my district... 
as far as you can see.”’ 

I looked; to the left out over the fertile Artibonite 
Valley, through which the clear, blue river snaked 
from horizon hills to horizon hills; to the right where 
semi-desert country, green with the sage-green of 
mesquite and cactus, stretched to more horizon hills. 

I looked widely. 

“It is all my district.”” With those words the 
gaunt man standing beside me on the ruins of the 
Créte-a-Pierrot had shattered my lurid picture of 
the battle so long ago decided. And the loving 
pride in his words suggested what manner of ego 
inhabited the faded khaki cocoon. 

Then I all at once realized that the man who thus 
spoke of ‘‘his district”? was a white man. But the 


160 Black Haiti 


battle . . . the battle in the Créte had been to drive 
the white forever from proprietorship in the island; 
to expel or to exterminate him, as the symbol of a 
dealer in human flesh. He stood for its buying and 
its selling. To black men and women, he personi- 
fied the wheel and the whip. It was forgotten that 
in Africa negroes also had enslaved negroes. 

Inevitably, therefore, the blacks had with merci- 
less fury driven out of Haiti the white symbol of 
tyranny, and in the constitution of their new Re- 
public they had prohibited his owning an inch of 
land. 

Yet the white man beside me was talking about 
‘‘his district.” The thing the Haitians had dreaded 
for more than a hundred years had happened. No 
wonder there is an organized party of Opposition 
which still sees all the present in the poignant fire 
of inherited memories. 

‘‘Trrigation,’ the man at my side continued, 
“irrigation of this Artibonite Valley would multiply 
its riches. . . . But I wonder? . . . What would 
be gained? . . . Aren’t people better off to keep 
their needs simple? 

“They'll tell you that the Haitians are poor. 
But what is poor? Is it being poor to need little? 
And to work only for those actual needs? 

‘“‘We mustn’t take a thing away unless we have 
something better to put in its place, must we?” 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 161 


We had arrived at the gendarme station under 
this Lieutenant’s command, knowing nothing what- 
ever about him, beyond his barename. We had not 
bothered to present a formal blanket letter of intro- 
duction from his Colonel. We had just blown in, 
dust-covered and thirsty from our journey through 
the desert region of his district. He had at once 
taken us over to his little bachelor establishment and 
there given us Haitian beer to wash the road out of 
our throats. 

Then I’d said I wanted to see the Créte. Andit was 
there that I’d begun to know the inside of the man. 

It is only a lonely Marine that will drop the mask, 
and to find him you have to gointointeriors. In the 
midst of his fellows he is ever the rollicking, swash- 
buckling, ‘‘goddam’’; enthusiastic only about a drink 
or a woman; vastly superior to all dark races; and 
even contemptuous of any whites not hailing from 
the land sanctified by his own nativity. 

Perhaps he is sometimes really that sorry crea- 
ture, but that is merely an accepted pose which is 
discarded in the isolation of the hills. 

They tell you in Port-au-Prince about a certain 
woman who came down from the United States to 
conduct an investigation of alleged atrocities. Her 
plan was to get a group of Marines drunk and talk- 
ing, whereupon she reported that they had boasted 
to her of such horrors. 


162 Black Haiti 


Now I don’t believe anyone is apt to brag about 
atrocities. Nor do I believe in all that veritas that’s 
supposed to lurk in vino. If you’re given to lying, 
you simply lie more grandiosely drunk than sober. 
Suppressed truth may, of course, leak out under 
intoxication, but I think it is unawares, and not a 
matter of open boasting. And in the face of such 
divergent testimony on the subject of German atroc- 
ities, as that presented by James Bryce and Will 
Irwin, it is wise to hesitate before swallowing 
atrocities. 

But then I was happily not in Haiti to conduct an 
investigation. I was under no obligation to con- 
clude this or that. I was merely indulging an incur- 
able passion for life; for following the lure of the 
road, and for letting impressions happen, rather 
than going after them. Because the intrepid little 
Black Republic rising out of the Atlantic had always 
interested me, I was there; and I was in the hills of 
Haiti because I love getting away from port towns 
and into interiors. 

The rest simply happened and was therefore more 
significant than if I had gone looking for it. 

It was, for example, purely unpremeditated that 
Lieutenant One and I stood looking out over the 
wide expanse of his district; and a fortunate accident 
that he should there have ceased to be merely a tall 
sun-weathered man in khaki, and appeared as an 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 163 


ego with the will-to-power; with a loving pride in 
that power; and both strangely combined with 
doubt as to the all-wisdom of our civilization. 

It was at this point of his self-revelation that he 
invited us to lunch. There would be something; he 
didn’t know just what; but he would like to have us 
stay. 

He lived in a little three-roomed wooden house, 
set right down upon the narrow dusty street. There 
was no privacy and not a scrap of shade as big as the 
palm of your hand. Across the way, in a similar 
house, children, like a school of bees, were droning 
aloud their lessons. The only gay thing in the 
place was the red and white, checker-board table- 
cloth on which our lunch was being set forth. 

While we waited its announcing the Lieutenant 
played with his two dogs, showing off tricks which 
he had been at great pains to teach them. 

In such an interior station, amusements are few, 
and salaries not large enough to permit the importa- 
tion of luxuries. 

But the lunch was extensive. Travelling equipped 
for all emergencies, we had been able to make contri- 
butions, and our respective servants with their 
racial love of making a fine showing, had laid out all 
we owned. There was the Lieutenant’s purée of 
peas, his steak, his rice and beans, his white wine and 
his beer; and our pickles, cheese, crackers, plain and 


164 Black Haiti 


sweet, tinned beans and apricots and chocolate; all 
finished off by the Lieutenant’s Haitian coffee, 
served in the living-room, which, with a squeeze, 
managed to contain us three, the two dogs and 
their tricks. There, later it developed that he was 
saving to get married; as though that were the happy 
end of saving rather than its merciless beginning. 
In talk over the coffee it appeared that the Lieuten- 
ant was the only white man in town. I suppose 
there must have been a priest, but he didn’t men- 
tion him. But the Lieutenant wasn’t lonely; you see 
he liked his job; he was interested in it. . 

This was interrupted by the Orderly coming in to 
take away the cups; our host pausing to question 
him for me. I had been curious about rectangles 
and squares of red and of blue sewed on the gar- 
ments of occasional peasants. In the course of a 
morning in one of the public markets you might see 
a dozen women with these big bright patches, 
stitched on without apparent reason, without any 
uniformity of size or shape; sometimes on the skirt, 
sometimes on the bodice. Frequently similar patches 
were seen on the little ready-made children’s slips 
hung up for sale in the market stalls. A man work- 
ing on the road might wear a shirt of this gaudy 
patchwork. 

I had been curious. But the foreigners I ques- 
tioned seemed never to have wondered about the 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 165 


custom, while the negroes’ answers had been eva- 
sive. So that the Orderly’s straightforward, man to 
man reply was surprising. 

The patches, he said, were put on at the order of 
the witch-doctor . . . the Papalot. Perhaps you 
were ill, or some one in your family was ill. Then 
often the Papalot would prescribe the patches, as a 
sort of penance, a placating of the spirits. 

From the earliest days of his importation into the 
island, the negro peasant of Haiti has been instantly 
secretive about everything connected with the tribal 
Voodoo brought over from Africa. And the mys- 
tery stimulated romanticizing. This unknown Voo- 
doo has captured white imaginations. Evidence was 
seldom weighed, and tales became more fabulous 
with re-telling, while the ceremony itself has been 
protected from investigation by the warning Haitian 
wireless—the signalling drum and conchshells. Now 
it was astonishing to hear the Orderly quite frankly 
admit a custom to be part of the Voodoo cult; part 
of those inherited superstitions, pronounced strange 
by us because they happen not to be our own. His 
honest answer was a tribute of trust in his question- 
ers, implying an instinctive confidence that between 
us there was no color prejudice. 

It was over the cigarettes, after the Orderly and 
the cups had withdrawn, that the Lieutenant’s talk 
drifted to the far-away girl who was to come and live 


166 Black Haiti 


in the little sun-baked house, set on the side street 
of a parched village in whose barren square had 
fallen the first of the American Marines to lose his 
life in Haiti. 

The girl’s photograph was brought out and she 
gazed earnestly about the room while we talked. 

They’d been sweethearts fifteen years ago, the 
Lieutenant said. Then.last summer he’d gone back 
home. But the years had made no difference; none 
to either of them. He’d simply rung the doorbell 
fifteen years after he’d gone away. Someone he 
didn’t recognize had opened the door. The little 
sister thus grown up out of all knowledge had, how- 
ever, known who he was, and had gone up to say in 
a perfectly matter-of-fact way that ‘‘Tom”’ was 
downstairs. 

Now he was saving to be married. 

And those wretched servants were undoubtedly 
making a feast of a week’s supplies! 

While he talked, shifting from Haiti to the sweet- 
heart and back again, the man within had become 
increasingly definite; more real than the lank fig- 
ure who smoked in the native rattan chair which 
looked out on the glare of a narrow, unpaved street. 


Then, in the odd way of all unexpected discover- 
ies, there was suddenly a new fact in the room. 
This man who by that chain of unconscious reve- 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 167 


lations had won my trust, I who, generally speaking, 
disbelieve in Marines, I who am unalterably opposed 
to capital punishment, this man I discovered was 
one of those who had been charged with atrocities. 

That was the new fact. He told me himself over 
our cigarettes, as we sat in that little box of a living 
room, with outside, the treble droning of lessons 

In the early days of the American Occupation he’d 
been stationed in a coast port. He’d been alone 
there with three or four of the native gendarmes. 
The Marines, being at that time new to the country, 
new even to its language, did not then know how 
far they could trust the gendarmes. They’d taken 
on any who enlisted; it was different now that the 
force was made up of picked men. 

90 he’d felt himself to be alone; everything having 
been thus strange. Meanwhile the brigands up in 
the higher hills had been growing more and more 
bold. They were burning and sacking farms on the 
very outskirts of the town. He’d sent for additional 
support, but the authorities had briefly replied 
that reinforcements were out of the question. He 
must not expect help, but must handle matters as 
best he could. 

There were bags of flour piled in the custom house 
of that port town, and he was responsible for them. 
The great war was on and there wasn’t flour enough 
to make bread for the world. Flour was worth more 


168 Black Haiti 


than diamonds. He placed extra watchmen. No- 
thing must happen to the flour. And there was also 
the population, looking to him for safety. 

Then the bandits roasted a man alive; the man 
was one of his watchmen. He’d seen what was 
left of the poor fellow. . 

And there could be no help; no reinforcements 
might be expected; he was to handle matters, they’d 
said, alone, as best he could: always remembering 
that they held him responsible. 

‘Drastic measures? But what was a man to do 
given the circumstances?”’ 

Proof? There’d been a track leading up to and 
away from the scene. It was the maik of a bare 
soot, as are most tracks in Haiti. But the big toe 
was missing from the imprint of the right foot. 
There’d been rain followed by hot sun, so that the 
deep impression made in mud had been baked into a 
cast of that toe-less foot. The Lieutenant had had 
the hard dry mold of it taken up with a shovel, and 
preserved until there should be found a living foot 
to fit the impression. 

That surely he felt was proof enough. 

But atrocities? He had the evidence of the inves- 
tigation; the lengthy, detailed testimony of witness 
after witness, to refute the charge. 

It was all there in pages of type; the cross-ques- 
tioning of lawyers and the answers of the witnesses. 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 169 


Listening, I felt that when the Lieutenant was an 
old man, long after everyone else had forgotten, 
when even the girl for whom one saved might be 
secretly tired of the topic, I felt that he would still 
read over the case; he being the sort of man to whom 
years do not matter, the sort of man who was merry 
and affectionate with dogs, a man who won the 
confidence of his negro orderly, a man who loved 
the power of his job, but who was sceptical about 
omniscience in the matter of civilizations. 


II 


LIEUTENANTS, NUMBERS Two AND THREE. Day 
after day the altar of liberty in the plaza is painted 
rose and white. Also rose and white is the tomb of 
the prominent local patriot which stands beside the 
altar. The flag-pole is white and rose. Even the 
base of the single royal palm standing guard over 
the tomb, that too is painted rose. 

And day after day the church of early Spanish- 
American architecture stands on the east side of 
the plaza, with next it the priest’s house, in the 
yard of which peacocks walk with slightly lifted tails. 
Always there is the gendarme station on the south, 
and on the west the barracks. Always too, there are 
the same things for sale in the market square. 
‘‘Every goddam thing you want, Madame,” says 
Lieutenant Three, a Haitian who has learned his 


170 Black Haiti 


English from the Marines and believes it to be the 
best. ‘‘Everything; all kinds fruit, vegetable, oni- 
mals. Some cow, sheep, plenty goat, pig, some 
horse . . . every damn thing.” 

All, day after day is the same; except that some- 
times it is the dry season, and sometimes for months 
there is heavy rainfall. 


This was Lieutenant Two’s station, somewhere in 
Haiti. It took him five days to ride over his dis- 
trict, most of which was not long ago bandit terri- 
tory. 

From here and from the hilis above, organized 
bands of brigands used to descend to rob the valley 
farms of their cattle and their horses; selling in 
Ennery the beasts they’d captured about Gonaives 
and Saint Marc, and in Saint Marc and Gonaives, 
those taken near Ennery. 

But that was all past. 

I commented upon the great relief to the peasant. 

‘“‘T don’t know that they feel that way about it,”’ 
the Lieutenant mused. Of course they are free 
now to get the benefit of any work they do. But I 
don’t know. In the old days, you see, there was 
always the hope that you might with luck become a 
successful Caco, as they call it, yourself. 

‘Perhaps they’d prefer to have it that way... 
I wonder?”’ 





Night after night the church of early 
Spanish-American architecture stands 
on the east side of the Plaza. 


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Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 171 


Number Two was young, with dark honest eyes, 
set in a pale smooth-shaven face. He drank inordi- 
nate quantities of Haitian coffee, and between cups, 
smoked cigarettes. 

Thus it was evident that he was nervous. He was 
nervous about our first dinner as his guests at the 
station. How would Lieutenant Three and the 
two strangers get on? How would the meal be 
served? And who on earth were those strangers, 
anyway’ What sort of people were they, appear- 
ing so unexpectedly at an out-of-the-way gendarme 
station? 

As we drank coffee on the little veranda before 
dinner, I became aware of an uneasy constraint, 
which it seemed more tactful to ignore than to 
attempt to reassure. 

Then part of the anxiety disappeared in the 
diversion of setting up our camp outfit, and 
in the informality of all going into the Lieuten- 
ant’s room to accept the hospitality of his wash- 
basin. 

The rest was dispelled in the first minutes after 
we sat down to dinner. 

The table-boy was new. He was a black child of 
about eleven, serving for his board and keep, for occa- 
sional garments, and with his afternoons free to go 
to school. ‘The garments were only a collarless shirt 
and a pair of trousers; the cut and pattern failing 


172 Black Haiti 


to impress themselves. But Lieutenant Two loved 
the refinements of life and Gimon must be trained 
into a proper table-boy. 

‘‘A gauche! A gauche! <A gauche!’’ softly urged 
the Lieutenant, as Gimon handed the dishes. At 
first poor Gimon was bewildered, and then we all 
took a hand in the training, making the instructions 
concrete instead of abstract, until suddenly the child 
comprehended. 

These whites could not eat unless their food was 
handed on the left side! Undoubtedly this was 
an important part of the white Voodoo. 

And Gimon began to circle about the table, pass- 
ing from left to left, to left, as though fascinated 
by the ritual. 

“You Haitians calls us fous blancs, don’t you?’’ 
said Lieutenant Two to Lieutenant Three, who 
agreed that such was the case. 

Then Gimon was appealed to by his master, and 
he paused in his left to left rotation to admit smiling 
that it was quite true that we were commonly known 
as ‘‘fool whites.”’ 

So constraint melted into laughter. 


We went together that night to a dance, not the 
wild, outdoor kind where you follow the drums, not 
the dance of the bare-foot and the sandalled, but a 
dance of the shod. 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 173 


Before dinner I confessed how in Port-au-Prince we 
would run away out into the night to pursue the 
drums to some starlit dance. And the Lieutenant 
who is Number Two, had blown upon a shrill whistle 
and ordered the answering gendarme to let the news 
go forth that there might be a dance. 

The priest with the peacocks had, it seemed, de- 
sired that there be none in Lent. As if peasant Hai- 
tians could refrain for forty days from expressing the 
dance that is in them! 

‘“Anyway,’ said Lieutenant Two, ‘‘they have been 
good and quiet over Ash Wednesday.”’ 

So, in a cabin which aspired to the name of café, 
there was a dance. The tiny room was decorated 
with garlands of paper cut into strips and chains; 
the sort of thing children do in Kindergarten. The 
music was a flute, a drum and a clarionet. The 
musicians played for the fun of it and for the drinks 
of the evening. As for the dancing . . . there 
does not live a Haitian who cannot dance. There 
was rhythm and feeling and grace in the paper- 
festooned room. And, although the feeling was 
primitive, it had a certain simple poise of its own. 
It is true that two distinct dances went on simul- 
taneously; the dance of the hips being quite inde- 
pendent of the dance of the feet. But with what 
erect grace the girls moved to the measure, and even 
the rakish angle at which the gendarmes wore 


174 Black Haiti 


their hats did not discount their own straight 
carriage. 

Nobody was self-conscious. That is one of the 
unforgettable qualities of the Haitian. The dancers 
in the cabin were unconscious of us, and of the 
Marine Corps man in charge of the district. The 
dancing gendarmes were unembarrassed at the pres- 
ence of the alien white who was their commanding 
officer. Yet they were not oblivious. The orches- 
tra played our national airs in compliment to us as 
spectators. 

The Lieutenant with the honest eyes could banter 
about ‘“‘fool whites’? with his table-boy; he could 
order a round of drinks for the musicians, but no 
one presumed upon his quiet fundamental dignity. 

And that, it seemed to me as we walked home 
through narrow dirt streets and across the plaza 
with the pink altar and the pink tomb and the 
pink palm, that was a tribute not only to the Lieu- 
tenant, but to the Haitians. 

But meditations were interrupted by Lieutenant 
Three who was suggesting, “‘Tomorrow, let’s have 
lunch by my place.”’ 


iO 


LIEUTENANTS NUMBERS Two, THREE AND FOUR. 
*‘Every man is working in his garden now.” 
That was how Lieutenant Three answered a 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 175 


question about the achievements in his country of 
what we call the ‘‘American Occupation.”’ 

Another Lieutenant put it differently. ‘‘Now,”’ 
he said, ‘‘you often see a man asleep under a mango 
tree. You never used to see that.”’ 

Here are two ways of saying that in revolution- 
ary and bandit days the peasant men of Haiti were 
more or less in hiding. It was, for example, gener- 
ally the woman who raised the crop, always the 
woman who took the produce to market, or who 
opened the door of the hut to a stranger; for one 
never knew... . 

At any moment there might be a summons to 
press her man into some army or other, into the army 
of the government, or into the force of a revolution- 
ary leader. 

It was wiser for men to lurk in back rooms throw- 
ing dice, or playing ‘‘nosey poker,” than to labor 
in the little farms which they call gardens; safer 
than to sleep under a mango tree. 

Anyway, that was the opinion of my friends, the 
Lieutenants, upon the morning of our going to 
lunch with Number Three. 

One of the indirect results of it all, they said, had 
been to encourage the idea that work is beneath male 
dignity. 

‘‘Why, a really self-respecting man won’t carry 
anything except his game-cock, or his cocomacaque.” 


176 Black Haiti 


‘Well, a cocomacaque is only a combination of a 
cane and a club. I don’t call that carrying any- 
thing; any more than the machete the tramp carries 
to prove he’s not a vagrant.” 

‘“Does that prove it?”’ 

‘“‘Oh, yes. The old Haitian law says a man carry- 
ing a machete can’t be arrested as a vagrant, the 
machete being a tool of industry. The law dates 
back from the days when fellows like King Chris- 
tophe and Toussaint tried to set up a standard of 
industry.” 

We discussed in this disjointed fashion, as we 
bumped over a road impossible even for horses 
during the rains, and at its best a jouncing experi- 
ence for an automobile. 

It was half-past eight; late for a tropical start, but 
we had been delayed at the gendarme station by 
the daily routine. Rural police had come in; there 
was the tale of a murdered pig and a consequent 
council with the local Justice of the Peace. All of 
which must be settled before the officer in charge 
could leave. 

Lieutenant Three, now that we were all friends, 
was communicative and jovial. His laugh was loose 
and mellow; as smooth as though it had been oiled. 
And it was as easily roused as palm leaves, stirring 
at the merest breath of a breeze. He had a full 
comfortable face with large round eyes whose balls 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 177 


were saffron-tinted. He was the type that in a white 
man would have been too florid, whose skin would 
have been marked with small congested veins. But 
Lieutenant Three’s skin showed no blemishes, for he 
was dark, or at least you thought so, until you saw 
his wife who was as black as though she had been 
dyed; or until you saw the prisoner who drummed, 
and who was dark as night is dark in the unlit 
heart of the jungle. 

This gendarme lieutenant was somewhat above 
the peasant class. Compared with a member of 
our own police force, he was possibly slightly more 
superstitious, but far more courteous. ‘That fric- 
tionless laugh of his, warm as the sun, that was an 
almost complete expression of the man within. 
What is left unsaid was to be seen later, on the face 
of the prisoner who drummed. 

But bumping along over the trail laughing talk was 
seldom more than half serious; the talk of sunlight. 

There was a dead fowl hung by its feet in a way- 
side bush. That was a hounga, a charm for good or 
evil. 

Nearly a hundred and fifty years ago Mungo Park 
records that in far-off Guinea, fowls were to be seen 
suspended from the branches, ‘‘to conciliate the 
wrath”’ of the Voodoo spirits which control the earth. 

Marks like inverted ‘‘swastikas’’ scrawled in 
indigo on the doors of huts indicated rank in the 


178 Black@Haicl 


Voodoo sect. Skulls of donkeys protected from 
harm the cultivated fields. 

And when we passed a woman with the odd red- 
and-blue patches sewed on her dress, there was 
‘‘some illness, some madness, maybe” in her, or 


in her family . . . some illness and Bocor had 
ordered the patches. 

Bocor .. . Papalot . . . hounga-man . . . witch 
doctor, medicine-man . . . they were synonymous. 


As for the bright patches, Lieutenant Three’s 
testimony tallied with that of Lieutenant One’s 
Orderly. 

In the south, about Jacmel, there were ‘‘plenty 
Bocor.”’ ‘The third lieutenant was himself from the 
south. 

It is the advisory policy of the Occupation thus 
to transfer from one section to another the person- 
nel of the gendarme force: with the double object of 
removing a man from temptation to partiality in 
his home district, and of stimulating in him a national 
spirit. 

The first of the old laws abolished under the new 
order was that exacting a tax from men travelling 
from one province to another. It was a long out- 
worn law, designed at the time of its passage to keep 
the recently freed slaves at work upon the land and 
to prevent their rushing off to sample liberty. It 
became eventually the cause of great inbreeding and 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 179 


was responsible for the sectional spirit which 
fomented so many of the disastrous revolutions. 

All this I had from a rice fat Marine Corps Gen- 
eral in a white uniform. 

So Lieutenant Three, though stationed in the 
north, was able to tell me about the south. 

““Oh, yes, in the south there are plenty Bocor. 
I know all about Bocor. We have some people who 
get spirit an’ can tell you when you will die . 
tell you all damn things. 

‘“Sometimes they try to take my life; with some 
poison; or some hounga. But they don’ get me. 

‘‘One man come to see me an’ I ask if he want 
drink. He take one, two, three drink. An’ the 
fourth, he talk. He say he pay Bocor money to kill 
me because I make wrong on him. An’ then he tell 
Bocor he pay no more, because, ‘you can’t get that 
man.’ 

‘‘Oh, we have many Bocor, plenty.”’ 

And Lieutenant Three laughed with the com- 
placence of the invulnerable. 

So, while the hand on the wheel skilfully guided us 
between, over or around stumps, fallen trees, deep 
wash-outs and boulders, through streams and over 
the dry stony beds of temporarily discontinued 
rivers, Lieutenant Three’s talk hovered about por- 
tents and poisonings; it discussed the astonishing 
mortality among Justices of the Peace. There was, 


180 Black Haiti 


for instance, one named Voltaire, occultly made way 
with by some sort of hounga. 

Fancy a Voltaire succumbing to a hounga! 

Writing in Batoula, Réné Maran represents the 
African belief that man was born to live: that ‘“‘if a 
person dies it is because some one or other has made 
a yarro, or pronounced incantations.” 

Thus, riding along in the sunlight, death was un- 
natural . . . abnormal, to Lieutenant Three. 
There must have been a hounga. 

And then the talk switched to his private life, to 
the sugar-mill he would some day own and to the 
shop his wife would keep. We were told how musical 
he was; how he played the organ in church; played 
without pay, though the service was worth five 
gourds; the priest charging twenty-seven gourds for 
wedding or funeral with organ, and five gourds less 
without. A gourd equalling twenty cents gold, 
the Lieutenant was contributing a dollar each time 
he played. 

All this was interrupted by our coming suddenly 
upon the “‘mysterious place.” 

There was that in the spot which led us by an 
unspoken consent to halt. 

The car came to a stop under the green of a tall 
silver-barked mahogany. There was witchery in 
the beauty of the place; in the trembling shadows 
under the trees which surrounded the great circular 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 181 


clearing; in the dark depth of the spring which 
bubbled up so far below the rocky surface that a 
boy had to descend to its level and pass up the 
water to the women waiting with their empty cal- 
abashes; and there was something subdued in that 
group of peasants come to the deep spring for 
water. 

We walked about under the trees. ‘“‘A very 
mysterious place’ Lieutenant Three kept saying. 
‘‘Tf you come here some night you can be ’sassinated. 
Uh-huh, Madame, they can ’sassinate you. 

‘An’ you can see some onimal, very strange oni- 
mal. Some wolf an’ some dog an’ some goat, but 
different; not real goat or dog . . . people in shape 
of onimal. 

‘‘Oh, this very mysterious place!”’ 

We walked about on the shadow tracery, on the 
delicate pattern of the dainty leaves of the mahog- 
any. Beside the spring a sand-box tree had stretched 
a long arm low over the clearing; around this branch 
the gnarled trunk of a vine had twisted itself; and 
around the vine, about on a level with our eyes, was 
coiled the motionless body of a glistening green 
snake. 

‘“‘T wonder,” said Lieutenant Two to Lieutenant 
Three, ‘‘I wonder now if I could hit that snake 
from here?” } 

His hand went meditatively to his revolver. You 


182 Black Haiti 


could not be sure that his eyes twinkled, for his 
voice was innocently speculative. 

‘‘Oh—oh!’’ Number Three cried, laughing the 
deep black laugh ripened by generations of sun. 
‘‘Oh—oh! If you do that, man, I’m not with you! 
don’t forget I’m not with you!” 

He called to the group silently filling their cala- 
bash water-jars. ‘‘Would you kill that snake?’’’ he 
asked. 

And the peasants, staring, shook solemn heads. 

Bellegarde, who is not only a Haitian, but also 
authorized by the Department of Public Instruction, 
writes of Voodoo as an African cult, a religious tra- 
dition which the negroes transported to Haiti, have 
never abandoned. According to this tradition, he 
says, the divinity in its omnipotence, is incarnated 
in the snake. 

So, gazing at the green twisted body, the peasants 
slowly shook their heads; while, after the negro cus- 
tom of saying the same thing many times, Lieuten- 
ant Three repeated, ‘‘No, man, I’m not with you.”’ 

Beneath that laughing exterior, how much of the 
Lieutenant believed in the superstitions, about which 
at one moment he was mocking, and at another, 
serious?’ Race memories die hard, and somewhere 
in everyone are beliefs which shrink into the cellars 
of the subconscious mind hiding from reason. What 
then would lie back of Number Three’s communica- 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 183 


tive joviality which apparently confided all to new- 
made friends? 

But that I was to understand better after I had 
heard the prisoner drum. 


In the house of Lieutenant Three we sat in great 
rattan rocking chairs, with white crocheted scarfs 
draped over their backs. And all the family of 
Number Three served his guests. There was the 
nephew from Jacmel who kept the phonograph 
supplied with records, changing from ‘‘The Tales 
of Hoffman” to ‘‘Cavalleria Rusticana,” follow- 
ing with ‘“‘Mister ’Rastus at de ’phone,” a group of 
Spanish love songs, and “‘Jests from Georgia.” 
There was also the niece who passed delicious old 
Madeira in little thin glasses on a mahogany tray. 
The two daughters set the table in a small back 
room opening from the main room where we sat 
listening to the Lieutenant’s phonograph; and look- 
ing out upon the street of which the room was but a 
partly-enclosed continuation. And over all gra- 
- ciously presided the wife, an ebony mountain 
clothed in white lawn. 

It was just before lunch that unexpectedly the 
fourth Lieutenant arrived. His breezy coming must 
always be an event wherever he goes. It is an event 
to remember how he appeared in the doorway of 
that little four-roomed, white-washed house; filling 


184. Black Haiti 


up the door with his tall, slender, long-waisted khaki 
figure, and flinging a saucy greeting to each of us, 
now in English and now in Creole. 

Would the ebony mountain ever grow older, in- 
stead of younger and more handsome every time he 
saw her? And how ‘‘fine’’ another was looking in 
her flowered chintz. 

He had come with money for the gendarme pay- 
roll and of course he would stay for lunch. Nothing 
would please him more. Didn’t we see that he’d 
come for lunch? 

When we sat down at the table we were three 
lieutenants and two vagabonds. The women of 
Number Three’s household followed the African 
custom imported by their ancestors, that women 
should wait until their lords had finished. 

The five sitting around that table represented 
every variety of skin-texture: through the Cauca- 
sian gradations to the dark pigment of Number 
Three. And in the resistance of skin to sun there is 
as much differentiation as in bumps on the head or 
lines in the palm. Lieutenant Four was of course 
the happy sort who freckles, the vagabonds had 
tanned; but upon Number Three alone did the sun 
fail to leave its mark. 

The lunch was jolly. Between those two Marine 
Corps men and the Haitian Lieutenant there was a 
bantering cordiality. 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 185 


‘“Madame wants to see a Voodoo temple,” teased 
Number Four. ‘“‘Haven’t you one to show her?” 

But Voodoo temples being against the law, and it 
being the duty of every member of the gendarme 
force to raid and abolish them, Lieutenant Three had 
no idea where such a temple could be found. 

“You're a liar!”’ laughed Four. 

It was after lunch that Lieutenant Three pre- 
sented me with a Voodoo drum: a cylindrical sec- 
tion of tree-trunk, hollowed out, with one end cov- 
ered with a piece of goat-skin, held in place by inter- 
laced cords by means of which the drumhead might 
be tightened. A border of hair had been left to 
adorn the skin with a fringe, mottled white and grey 
and black. 

Among the prisoners there happened to be a 
drummer. Lieutenant Three would have him drum. 
And almost as magically as though he had been pro- 
duced by the rubbing of a lamp, the drummer stood 
in the door; a short, muscular negro wearing the blue 
and white stripes of the convict doing a six months’ 
term; ‘‘monkey clothes” the peasants call them. 

He took the drum and the chair provided by the 
Lieutenant, and, slipping his right foot through a 
rope attached for the purpose of steadying the drum 
as it rested on the floor with the other end against 
the left knee, he began to tighten the goat-skin head. 

‘‘What’s he in for?’’ asked one of the Marines. 


186 Black Haiti 


‘*A thief,’’ someone answered. 

‘‘What did he steal?” 

I thought the conversation tactless, but everyone 
else seemed to regard it merely as the casual filling- 
in of a pause. 

‘‘Oh, I don’t know,’’ was Number Three’s reply. 
‘*T forget.” 

Whereupon, absent-mindedly, all the time tight- 
ening the strings, the convict in question supplied 
the information. 

‘‘ Mats.” 

He seemed to have no thought of denying the 
charge. If anyone was interested, why then, briefly, 
it was corn. 

‘It’s his second time with me,” the Lieutenant 
was saying. ‘‘When he gets out, he’ll be in again. 
You'll see. Here he gets nine cents a day for food, 
an’ that’s more than the average Haitian ever has. 
Oh he'liibebackiranvig) 7 

There was no more talk, for the drummer had 
begun to beat, sounding the call-notes, very soft and 
very staccato; soft deep notes produced by the heel 
of the hand beating on the taut goat-skin; sound- 
ing those call-notes which are heard for such great 
distances, ventriloquil notes seeming to come from 
all directions at once. 

The stolen “‘mazis”’ is forgotten. After all, was 
it so important? 





The prisoner who drummed, 





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: ¥ a ¥ = 7 . De 
f yy, 4 % 


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bars a4 | 


a a 
qs 

/y* Meee 
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Sal we 

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nat 
— 





Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 187 


Now the tips of the drummer’s fingers alternate 
with the heel of the hand. And to that rhythm your 
heart dances. 

‘‘The priest,’” Number Three exclaimed, ‘‘oh, the 
priest will make hell on me!”’ 

The priests, I vaguely remember, fear the influ- 
ence of the drum. 

‘Well, never mind . . . if he make hell, I don’ 
play the organ no more!”’ 

The cadence has quickened and now the right hand 
is using the drum-stick, striking with it on the side, 
on the edge of the goat-skin and on the drum-head 
itself; while, all the time, the palm and the finger- 
tips of the left hand keep up an insistent throbbing 
pulsation. The deep booming notes are louder, 
faster, the impact of the stick crashing into their 
rich, full tone. 

This is a theme more complex, more troubling, 
than the dance drums. The swift, wild rhythm 
pulses through the drummer’s black arms, bare to 
the shoulders of his striped shirt. It pulses down 
his arms until it finds expression in the hands which 
drum. It passes in waves across the profound black- 
ness of his face, seeming to play there like high lights 

on a polished surface. 
His head is thrown back, jerked this way and that 
with the cadence. 

And in the savage rhythm, in the thought reflected 


188 Black Haiti 


like light in his face, are the race memories; of “‘mys- 
terious places’’ where pale green snakes which must 
not be killed coil about the contorted trunks of vines, 
and where, when the moon trickles down like wan 
sunlight through the ethereal foliage of the mahog- 
any, then there gather the fantastic figures of goats 
which are nevertheless not goats, of wolves unlike 
true wolves and dumb dogs such as never walk by 
day. They move to the beat of restless, troubled 
drums. 

It is the blood of Guinea which now flows and 
throbs in the long black arms of the drummer. For 
the race memory leads always back to that distant 
Guinea. 

It follows the trail through dense steaming jungle, 
where African girls wearing grass bustles and leaf 
aprons walk in single file; holding themselves erect 
with the grace of the girl who had passed us old 
Madeira in thin glasses on a mahogany tray. 

The bodies of these girls respond to the drum, for 
they know wellits cadence. They know too, how to 
let rhythm possess the arms and the feet, but above 
all the hips. 

Spirits dominate that jungle. They are known 
by strange names, Legba and Damballah, M’bo 
Nannan, and Golimin. Those, and many others. 
And there are charms to please the good spirits, and 
to propitiate the ones who do evil to men; so great 


Four Lieutenants, and the Prisoner 189 


evil that men walking in the forest have come to 
fear their own shadows. 

Thus back and back through the ever-changing 
rhythm, the race-memories lead. . 

But of us who listen only Lieutenant Three can 
follow the drum into that far past. 


To me the drum is saying that Lieutenants must 
surely be but a transient phase of evolving life. 
While the gift of the drummer to the world is the 
precious and imperishable faculty of imagining. 
For he sees visions and makes music. 


THE FIRST OF THE BLACKS 


A CLOCK striking midnight; a sleepy cock-crow 
and the far-off bark of a dog; a few scattered lights 
low along the curve of a bay; a moon at the zenith 
pouring light upon the unbroken surface of a still 
harbor; these things had composed Cape Haiti as I 
first saw it. My second impression had been of 
hot narrow streets in one of which a fury of resent- 
ment possessed a little mulatto man. 

Now approaching Cape Haiti from the interior it 
seemed that I came upon an altogether different 
town; for this time I was arriving in the mood of 
memory; the mood of re-creation, rather than of 
exploring, rather than of questioning a land un- 
known. Haiti was no longer for me an undiscovered 
country, appearing after five days of ocean, sud- 
denly ahead on the horizon; surprising the voyager 
after the fashion of destinations which throughout a 
journey have seemed mythical until all at once there 
they are! 

There was nothing of this unexpected quality in 
our approach to the Cape from the hills of the inte- 

190 


a 


The First of the Blacks I9I 


rior. Haiti had become an intimate experience, an 
integral part of personal living, taking its place 
among remembered things. Much as one might 
feel in the problematical hereafter, I felt now that 
when I was alive I had delighted in the fragrance of 
Haiti’s coffee blossoms; in the gold of its oranges 
hung among glossy dark leaves; in the rhythm of 
dances under the moon; in the life of the road on its 
way through Bizoton to Leogane, to the Godves, 
big and little, and on past the lake to Miragodane. 
I had eaten cassava cakes baked by that roadside; 
heard there the wailing for the dead; lost money in 
the cock-pits; and sipped warm champagne at a 
wedding feast. These things had joined the stream 
of memory. ‘They were part of the mood in which 
I approached Cape Haiti from the hills where I had 
known lieutenants and a prisoner who drummed. 


Down from Plaisance we had followed the capri- 
cious way of the lovely road whose only obstacle is 
the fording of the Limbé River of which one may 
never, not even in its good-tempered months, be 
quite certain. It can rise an exaggerated number of 
feet in no time at all, and only a few days after our 
easy passage ten cars were accumulated along its 
banks, awaiting man-power to drag them across. 
But it had been without adventure, other than the 
adventure of beauty, that we had coasted from 


192 Black Haiti 


mountain country, down to the flat fertile plain of 
the north. 

It was late on a Sunday afternoon and people were 
leaving the crowded wayside cock-pits. Many went 
carrying under their arms bloody and exhausted 
roosters, in none of which—whether victorious or 
defeated—was there a crow left. It is well for the 
roosters of Haiti that the space of a week separates 
Sabbath from Sabbath; that there are six days in 
which warriors may rest. 

The people who in the late sunlight drifted home 
from the cock-fights, moved with the erect self- 
reliance characteristic of Haiti. There is something 
of that same quality of self-respect in the Dyaks of 
Borneo, though they seem less conscious of its pos- 
session: theirs being the independence of splendid 
savages who have never known the insidious poison 
of the thing we have learned to call an ‘‘inferior- 
ity complex,’’ whereas in the blood of the Haitian 
there flows the bitter inheritance of remembered 
slavery and degradation. Yet the Haitian walks 
and speaks and moves with an independence not 
unrelated to arrogance. Your salutation of a mar- 
ket woman, for example, will be returned in kind; 
if you do not add Madame to your bonjour, neither 
will she give you a Madame or a Monsieur, as the 
case may be. 

In this peasant Haiti you feel suddenly immersed 


——— 


The First of the Blacks 193 


in an equality of intercourse, more genuine than 
anything you have ever seen. 

In the coast towns there is less of this easy equal- 
ity, for there, contact with the world has sowed the 
deadly seeds of an inferiority, which expresses itself 
in an occasional surly insolence, or in a morbid 
readiness to see contempt where often contempt 
was not intended. But.in the interior, isolation 
and illiteracy have at least protected the peasant 
from devastating humiliations. He treads the soil 
of his Haiti, glorying in the tradition of the ances- 
tors who won it for him. It is the memory of their 
magnificently brave struggle, it is the sense of a 
subject race having gained for themselves their 
independence, that expresses itself in the dignity 
with which these peasants sit their absurd little 
donkeys or their lean hungry horses; and it is with 
that sense that they stride under the perfect balance 
of their heavy burdens. Self-won freedom is incar- 
nated in this nation of blacks whose poverty is to us 
appalling, but whose simple dignity is matchless. 

Such were the people who made the road gay with 
turban and with flashing white laughter on that 
Sunday afternoon when in reminiscent mood we came 
down from the interior. 

The road which leads to the Cape is memory- 
haunted. It passes between what was in Colonial 
days an avenue of rich estates. But earthquake and 


194. Black Haiti 


desertion, banditry and vengeance, climate and 
time, all have left their mark upon gate-posts, upon 
obliterated drive-ways and ruined mansions. 

In my remembering mood it was easy to slip back 
further than personal experience; back into the days 
when these roadside gate-posts guarded the way to 
the indolent luxury of slave establishments. And so 
I found myself remembering in the year seventeen 
hundred and eighty something; just before the fall 
of the Bastile, while in Haiti Dessalines had not yet 
come down from the bandit hills to which he had 
escaped. 

I was remembering that a carriage drove down a 
well-kept drive and out between two great square 
gate-posts. I remembered whites in the carriage, 
on their way to a féte at a neighboring plantation. 
They were women with their hair in the ringlets of 
Marie Antoinette, and with their silks voluminously 
puffed and flounced, for they had just returned 
from the Colonists’ customary six months in Europe 
where money had been spent with the lavish prod- 
igality, known as ‘‘Creole’’ in the Paris of those 
days. 

I fancied them as chattering of the latest Parisian 
follies, of the heat of Cape Haiti, of the ennui of 
Colonial life, and all the time the younger of the 
women thought of something of which she did not 
speak; that behind her words lay a deep resentment 


The First of the Blacks 195 


of the mulatto woman whom she had found installed 
when she returned from Europe. Of course she 
was familiar with the custom. She knew that the 
married men all had negress or mulatto mistresses; 
the theory being that it was absolutely necessary for 
a white man to have a woman of color intimately 
linked to his household, since it was only through 
her that he felt certain of protection. She would warn 
him of plots among the slaves, who were supposed 
to be chronically scheming to poison their owners. 

The young woman in the carriage knew this. She 
knew that a colored mistress was accepted philosoph- 
ically; yet, now that the thing had happened in her 
own life she was resentful. She flames at her hus- 
band’s careless explanation—‘‘a safe-guard for us 
all you know, my dear.” In France, she was think- 
ing, such things were kept more decently out of 
sight, while at the Cape one had to submit to the 
woman’s ordering one’s servants, managing one’s 
household. Was such mortification really so neces- 
sary? And out of the deep unspoken thoughts 
there rose to the surface questions. 

‘‘Don’t you think,” she asked the older woman, 
‘“‘that we after all fear the slaves too much? They 
seem to me very peaceful and harmless.”’ 

“Oh, things have been quiet for ever so long 
now—ever since the lesson we gave them about that 
dreadful Mackandal. But we have to remember 


196 Black Haiti 


that they outnumber us twelve to one. And then 
there are all the affranchis . . . not satisfied with 
owning slaves themselves and going to France to 
be educated, they are now demanding to be allowed 
to enter the professions—”’ 

‘‘Why, who ever heard of such a thing! Colored 
men—”’ 

‘Yes, and to hold public office, too. Of course 
all this has come from the early settlers freeing their 
mulatto children. Naturally they were very low 
people or they wouldn’t have thought of it. The 
nobility didn’t come to the island until later, and in 
the beginning some of them I am sorry to say did 
the same thing. There was the Marquis de Paille- 
terie—the father of Dumas you know? 

‘‘Eh bien! That’s how it began. And look at 
the trouble it’s made for us! Why, but for seeing 
how the free men of color have risen in the world, 
the slaves wouldn’t have dreamed of revolt! And 
now my husband says God alone knows where it will 
lead. . . . I wouldn’t have a minute’s peace of 
mind if I didn’t have such confidence in Zoune. I 
hope your husband’s new femme de ménage will prove 
as trustworthy. These women are our greatest 
safe-guards.”’ 


The women in the carriage did not know how 
blood may mount under black skin. They did not 


The First of the Blacks 197 


give a thought to the man who handled the reins. 
He was but a slave; a good slave with an ambition 
beyond his station. He’d taught himself to read 
and write. He’d had the help of his godfather, a 
certain old black who had somehow picked up a 
little learning. His patience and his industry had 
attracted the notice of Monsieur Libertat, the kind- 
hearted manager of the plantation who had _ pro- 
moted him to the enviable position of coachman 
which left hours of leisure in which to study or to 
meditate upon the wonderful thoughts hidden in 
books; thoughts which were so slowly and painfully 
acquired that they could never be forgotten. 

It was these thoughts which would come to com- 
fort the coachman when his blood mounted at such 
conversations as I had fancied between the white 
occupants of a carriage on the afternoon when I was 
remembering that an ‘‘elegant equipage”’ drove out 
between gate-posts on the road back of the Cape. 

The coachman thought of Abbé Raynal, and of his 
prophecy that to break the yoke there was needed 
only a chief “sufficiently courageous to lead slaves to 
vengeance.” The coachman repeated often to him- 
self the very words of Raynal, ‘‘Where is the great 
man to be found? . . . He will appear, we cannot 
doubt it; he will show himself to raise the sacred 
standard of Liberty and to gather round him his 
companions in misfortune. More impetuous than 


198 Black Haiti 


the mountain torrents, they will leave behind them 
on all sides the ineffaceable signs of their just 
resentment.” 

It was those stirring words which I fancied the 
coachman as pondering when he drove out of the 
gate and along the road. 

He was a small figure as he sat manipulating the 
reins, and thinking his great thoughts; when he 
stood he was but two inches over five feet. Under his 
yellow handkerchief-turban he had eager wide-open 
eyes. Now and then his thick lips parted showing 
that his teeth were long and very white and that 
he had lost the upper and lower incisors. He was 
an ugly man with his missing teeth and his flat 
up-tilted nose. When he assented to some com- 
mand from the whites in the carriage his voice was 
nasal. And on his right hand the little finger had 
been broken so that it curved back in a semi-circle. 

This man sat abstracted. The horses needed 
scant attention; the merest flick of the reins was 
enough; such being the sympathetic understanding 
which he established between himself and the ani- 
mals under his care. Thus he was free to meditate, 
to think of Abbé Raynal, while gradually there 
formed the vision which he later put into writing. 

‘“‘T felt,’ he wrote, ‘‘that I was fated to accom- 
plish great things. When I received the Divine 
intimation I was fifty-four years of age. A neces- 


The First of the Blacks 199 


sity was then laid upon me to commence my career. 
A secret voice said to me. . . . It is I who must 
be that leader predicted by Raynal!”’ 

The coachman with the yellow turban and the 
missing teeth thought these things, because that 
coachman was Toussaint Louverture, the founder 
of human liberty in Haiti. 


It is only in travel, I think, that history comes 
thus sensuously alive, that it appears with the real- 
ity of personal memory. You set forth with your 
mind stored with history and with contemporary 
opinion. But from the first moment of entering the 
harbor the history begins to appear as memory, its 
characters as ancestors, and contemporary opinion 
as gossip, while the country itself becomes a living 
personality. 

Its contours are characteristic. It manifests itself 
in moods of sun or moon, of mist and cloud and rain. 
It puts on a garment of foliage patterned with blos- 
som. It is decorated or defaced by the hands of 
man. And hundreds of incidents, of adventures, 
merge in the mosaic of its individuality. 

There are lands where the ancestors immediately 
dominate, but Haiti is not of that sort. It is the liv- 
ing Haiti which at first possesses you: a character so 
vividly compelling that for the moment you forget 
much of what you’ve been told about the forebears 


200 Black Haiti 


of this new acquaintance. You begin by observ- 
ing only the most striking of the inherited traits, 
those which are obvious in the present. Later, you 
gradually become increasingly aware of the ancestors. 

Thus it was at the Cape, at Sans Souci, and at the 
Citadel that I found myself remembering Haitian 
ancestors as though I had actually known them; 
remembering them not as names associated with 
deeds or dates, with battles and declarations, but as 
men with whose fears and ambitions I was perfectly 
familiar, whose sufferings and triumphs I re-lived, 
whose sins I knew all about, and whose words—the 
fragment of a sentence, an oath, a cry—echoed 
in my memory; seeming so real that I often caught 
myself striving to remember more; incredulous that 
effort to recall was vain, since those recollections 
were history, and that history has recorded nothing 
more. 


At dusk on a Sunday afternoon the young girls 
of Cape Haiti are in their best frocks; thin dresses of 
brilliant color—of cerise, of jade, of clear grassy 
green, of peacock blue, or the plain white which, in 
contrast to their lustrous black skins, is almost as 
startling as the most gorgeous of the colors. And 
against the gloss of skins all their bits of jewelry 
shine out; the usual glinting gilt hoops of ear-rings, 
necklaces of coral, and bracelets slipping back and 


The First of the Blacks 201 


forth with every movement. ‘These girls wear shoes 
and affect stockings of a raspberry shade, for they are 
not of the kerchief-turbaned, barefoot, pipe-smoking 
maidens of the road; not of those Choucounes and 
Idalinas of whom Oswald Durand sang, but of the 
class of towns-folk who are found in all the coast 
cities of the Republic. 

At dusk these girls in the bright thin dresses come 
out of the tiny one or two-roomed houses in which 
large families somehow contrive to enjoy life, liberty 
and the happiness to which blacks take so naturally 
that they would never think of using the word 
‘‘pursuit’’ in connection with it. 

The little houses are lined with newspapers, the 
picture supplements being featured on the parti- 
tions between the rooms; and when in the twilight 
the girls with their neatly coiffed hair and their 
clean gay dresses emerge, they seem like little dark- 
skinned dolls which have been packed carefully 
away in the wooden boxes of houses. 

But with the passing of that brief twilight the 
girls lose their resemblance to tidy dolls and take on 
the veiled texture of moths; moths which flutter in 
little groups about the street corners, waiting for 
life and for lovers. Sometimes a solitary moth is 
balanced expectant on the curb; as though she had 
found her lover and but watched for his coming 
while she dreamed of the life which might follow. 


202 Black Haiti 


The girls had already come out upon the Sunday 
afternoon when we, having followed the road came 
at last to a stop before the door of the Hotel Cos- 
mopolitan. 


The Hotel Cosmopolitan is a small wooden house 
of the species known as a ‘“‘private dwelling.” Itisa 
dingy house whose only pretension is the extravagant 
splurge of the purple bougainvillea which lavishly 
drapes itself over the brief front veranda. It is an 
hotel to the extent that it is the only place where you 
are recommended to stay in the Cape, and it is 
Cosmopolitan in that it is patronized by citizens of 
the U.S. A. and run by a cheery Scotchwoman who 
somehow achieves sanitation where there is no 
sanitation. 

In my remembering this hotel was a recurrent 
note of interruption. It seemed persistently to be 
saying, ‘“Oh, I beg your pardon! But this is 1925.” 
Especially at meals did it thus interrupt. From the 
balcony of my room I looked on the ruined walls of 
a past century, looked, as it were, upon the earth- 
quake of the year 1842, when at the close of a serene 
sunny afternoon there had come sudden subterran- 
ean thunder when the earth had opened in long 
crevasses and the sea had thrown itself upon the 
crumbling town, where flames had been added to 
the horror of flood and of crushing masonry. 


The First of the Blacks 203 


But my memories never descended to the dining 
room of the hotel. That was reserved exclusively 
for khaki, for red sunburned faces and necks and 
arms; and for bored, idle wives. 

Being close to the street, the hotel was a receiving 
station for a variety of noises, Nordic and Haitian. 
It registered the precise minute when each occupant 
rose with a creak from his bed, when he washed his 
hands, when the water was lifted to his face, when 
he cleaned his teeth, when he had replaced slippers 
with shoes, and when finally he descended the uncar- 
peted stairs. It relayed information about break- 
fast, who had boiled eggs and who fried. 

When the telephone began to ring in its lower 
hall it recorded the conversation of men; whether 
for example a ship had been sighted and what time 
she would be in. Then as the day advanced it 
registered the noise of children being sent to school 
and of the scolding of servants, and now the ringing 
telephone produced plans for a picnic—who would 
bring cake and who sandwiches. Over the telephone 
invitations would be issued or accepted, articles bor- 
rowed and returned; all in the voices of women; 
while up the stairs floated the Creole of the kitchen 
into which had been incorporated the universal god- 
dams, while drifting through the ever open doors and 
windows there came the voice of Haiti. 

Before the first bed had creaked there would come 


204 Black Haiti 


from the streets the call of “Petit pan. . . petit 
pan... petit pan!’’ Cried in the flute-like treble 
of children. Then, for those who could afford it 
‘petit beurre’ was the refrain of the child peddlers. 
And then down some intersecting street would come 
the news of ‘‘bel café,” of “‘rapadou”’... Ac- 
cented on the pa with a given the sound of ah; and 
cried in sweet young voices, the word may mean any 
lovely romantic thing you like, though it is in reality 
only a little chunk of dark native sugar, done up in 
a scrap of palm leaf and pinned with a thorn. 

A perfectly nice breakfast of rolls and butter, 
coffee and sugar has now been set to music in the 
streets. ‘Then some one comes along urging bananas 
as a good addition. Later in the day there will be 
cried for sale brooms, cassava cakes, meat, matches 
and cigarettes, while in the afternoon the gaz-girls 
balance tins of kerosene on their heads. 

So is the supply proclaimed at the hours of de- 
mand, thus doing away with the necessity of taking 
thought for living by so much as five minutes ahead 
of the game. 

And this symphony of the streets comes into the 
loosely built, wide-open hotel where it adds itself 
to the noises of Nordic civilization; to the ablutions, 
the telephoning and the dining-room conversation. 

But I had only to go out into the streets to be at 
once restored to that remembering mood in which I 


The First of the Blacks 205 


had arrived at the Cape; for everywhere there were 
the ruins of the past, the modern town being built 
of and upon and among ruins. Many of the ruins 
remain untouched as Nature left them when her 
destructive mood had passed. Roofless walls, arched 
doorways, and windows stand among unrecogniz- 
able brick. Trees have sprung up in what were once 
inhabited rooms, and coral and bougainvillea have 
laid mantles of color over the grey chaos. 

About Port-au-Prince there lingered for me little 
flavor of the days when slaves struggled for liberty. 
The Port gives the entirely false impression of dat- 
ing from the time when Dessalines danced there in 
celebration of the massacres. Its history seems con- 
centrated upon what has happened since the Inde- 
pendence. Whereas, at the Cape everything is sub- 
ordinated to the heroic effort of the slave to cast off 
his bondage. What went before, or what occurred 
after, does not now come alive; it is vague in the pres- 
ence of the mighty years. The Cape seems to date 
from Mackandal in the year 1758. 

Columbus failed to impress his personality upon 
it; the aborigines, who ‘‘all naked as they were” 
so pleased the great explorer by the ‘“honor and the 
reverence”’ they showed him, seem to have left no 
ghosts of their tragedy to haunt the Cape. Nor 
have the buccaneers who came over from Tortuga 
left anything to be remembered as one wanders day 


206 Black Haiti 


after day about the town. Even Christophe’s 
personality withdraws to Sans Souci and to the 
Citadel. 

Thus in the streets my remembering began always 
with Mackandal. It is impossible to stand upon 
what was the old Place d’Armes and not begin by 
remembering Mackandal. 

Before the great names of the Haitian Independ- 
ence there was this Mackandal; born in Africa of 
high parentage, reared in the Mohammedan faith, 
and then delivered by Fate into the hands of slave 
traders and sold to the plantation of Lenormand de 
Mézy, which was just outside the town of the Cape, 
not far from the Bréda plantation where Toussaint 
Louverture was born. And Mackandal must often 
have paid his respects to Toussaint’s father, who 
back in Africa had been a prince. To the whites, 
this prince had become a slave, but the negroes never 
forgot that he was the son of their sovereign. Until 
at last the plantation manager himself recognized 
that among his slaves there was a prince, and as- 
signed to his service five slaves. Undoubtedly 
Mackandal would have come over from the neigh- 
boring plantation of Mézy to render homage to 
Toussaint’s father. 

And Toussaint must have heard their talk; they 
would have told him how he was the grandson of the 
king Gaou-Guinou: into the slave-child they would 


The First of the Blacks 207 


have instilled a tradition of the freedom which they 
had lost and which he had never known. 

When Mackandal disappeared Toussaint had been 
only a little boy, smaller than others of his age, but 
always alert, always eager: listening. 

Mackandal, they said, had gone to the hills, those 
hills which were the refuge of all whose spirits could 
not suffer slavery. From time to time news of 
Mackandal came by the ancient wireless of the negro. 
It told how up in the mountains he was organizing 
the runaway slaves, and people were beginning to 
say that he was divinely inspired. 

On Saturday nights when all over the plain of the 
Cape, the drums whispered ‘‘Come!”’ dark figures, 
like detached fragments of the night itself, hur- 
ried to obey the summons, moving as silently as 
shadows. The Colonists, hearing the drums, 
thought only that somewhere there was to be a 
dance. The Colonists understood that the negro 
must be allowed to dance, that he must satisfy his 
insatiable craving. for rhythmic expression. So on 
Saturday nights when the drums called, the slaves 
were free to dance. 

But at every dance, all over the northern plain, 
low, stealthy voices repeated what was being said of 
Mackandal. 

‘‘We areto bethemasters . . . we the masters.” 
Up in the hills Mackandal had said it. 


208 Black Haiti 


““How?”’ 

‘‘Mackandal knows. It is he . . . who will 
drive out the whites. Mackandal knows the poi- 
sons. He is acquainted too with all magic.” 

And the voices sank below the softest whisper of 
the softest. drum. 

‘‘Mackandal has the power. He can at his will 
become any sort of animal. And whoever would 
dare to arrest him, that man would at once die. 
You will see... .” 

A superstitious and reverential terror gathered 
about his very name. Indeed no one ever spoke it 
aloud. And Toussaint, growing from a child to a 
boy, heard the talk and perhaps shared the reverent 
awe. 

Then in December of 1757 the negroes of the plan- 
tation Dufresne arranged a great dance: a calinda 
on a grand scale. When Mackandal heard the dry 
staccato beat of many sticks against the sides and 
the rims of many drums he could not resist the call, 
the strangely moving call of syncopated rhythm 
sounding in the still and lonely night. He heard, and 
in defiance of his habitual caution, he obeyed. 
Almost against his own will he obeyed, his body 
compelled by the rhythm, by the desire to mingle 
with the swaying crowd. He obeyed. 

Like the rest he danced, and like the rest, being 
thirsty he drank deeply of white rum; danced again 


The First of the Blacks 209 


and again drank; until at last all slept the heavy 
sleep of intoxication and of bodily fatigue. 

And while they slept somehow news of Mackan- 
dal’s presence reached the manager of the plantation, 
and two men were sent with loaded pistols to guard 
the cabin where the dreaded hero slept, while others 
were hurried to the Cape for official orders. 

Mackandal slept, and so at last did the two men 
who watched with pistols on a little table before 
them. But when a sudden barking of dogs aroused 
the guard, the cabin was empty. There was im- 
mediate search. 

Under the coffee bushes where he lay hidden 
Mackandal knew that it was only a matter of 
moments. He had had no start. Day would soon 
break. It was too much to hope that he could lie 
where he was until under the cover of night it was 
safe to attempt flight back to the hills. It was not 
possible . . . the dogs were nearer: barking, caper- 
ing dogs; dogs circling wide, heads down, no longer 
barking. He could distinguish now the words of 
the shouting men . . . could see the color of the 
dogs as they came, in deadly earnest, heads to the 
ground, following the scent, straight, straight to the 
coffee bushes. . . . 


The Superior Council of the city of Cape Haitian 
met to consider the case. It was clearly time to give 


210 Black Haiti 


these slaves a lesson: one that they would not soon 
forget. Slave conditions in the Colony made the 
devising of a suitable lesson difficult. Flogging was 
too good for such a fellow and too common to 
cause remark. Hanging was not enough. Public 
burning at the stake was decided upon as the 
best they could do, though even that was not un- 
known. 

When the announcement was made that Mackan- 
dal was to be burned in the Place d’Armes, the 
negroes recalled a hundred miraculous tales of this 
man, told by a hundred torch-lights. 

‘“The whites,’ they concluded, ‘‘cannot kill 
Mackandal. To escape them he will if necessary 
change himself into a fly—or a mosquito. 

‘It is not possible to kill such a man.” 


In Cape Haiti, if one remembers at all, one must 
remember Mackandal and the careless confidence of 
his devoted followers. On the site where he was 
bound to the stake it is impossible not to remember 
Mackandal; impossible to forget how, with the 
flames leaping around him, he had amazed the spec- 
tators by wrenching himself free of the cords and 
by dashing to freedom; shouting as he ran strange 
unknown words—African words. 

‘“Mackandal!”’ went up the cry, ‘‘Mackandal is 
saved!” 


The First of the Blacks 211 


Again there were troops to hunt down the vic- 
tim; and force to deliver him again to the flames. 


And whether or not the boy Toussaint had run 
off from the plantation to see Mackandal save him- 
self from the whites, may not be remembered, his- 
tory being as inadequate as it is. But even had 
he escaped the sight of that horror in the Place 
d’Armes he would have heard the talk of the negroes 
when at the call of the drums they gathered to 
dance. 

Mackandal, they insisted, had not perished. It 
would not have been possible to kill a man like Mack- 
andal. Why, in a moment he would have changed 
himself into a mosquito—or perhaps a fly. The 
whites could not kill him. There were so many 
tales to prove it. ‘“‘Any day,’ they said, “‘he will 
be coming back.’’ For years they expected him. 


Like the occupants of my remembered carriage, 
the Colonists felt once more reasonably safe. Mack- 
andal had been a lesson to the slaves. They trusted 
that those who had seen the thing would repeat it 
to those importations from Africa which year after 
year were sold in the market of the Cape. It was 
well that slaves should know what happened to 
runaways who plotted. So the Colonists were 
reassured, and after all did not every white man 


212 Black Haiti 


have his negress or mulatto women? No plot 
could reach dangerous proportions without their 
knowledge. And now the slaves had no longer a 
leader: it was a great thing to have Mackandal out 
of the way. 

No one thought of fearing Toussaint, who grown 
up and married spent all his leisure learning to read: 
a good servant too; Monsieur Libertat had made 
him his coachman; he had a way with animals; 
there was no better coachman on any plantation. 

What did he read? Oh, whatever he could get 
they supposed. But few really thought about what 
a slave read. 

Meanwhile very slowly the great dream in Tous- 
saint’s brain was gradually becoming a definite 
plan. At first, it had been no more than a shapeless 
vision. He had been, he says, fifty-four years old 
when he first realized that he was to be that leader 
prophesied by Abbé Raynal. And there was much 
to do to make ready. Such a leader must know 
military science: he must understand government; 
before the magnitude of the undertaking Toussaint 
hesitated. 

And it was in the last days of his reluctance that 
I remembered him driving the carriage through the 
great Colonial gate-way and out upon the highway. 
I was remembering him as he was, just before French 
Revolutionists had declared that all men were to be 


The First of the Blacks 213 


free to employ their bodies as well as their spirits in 
whatever activity they chose, provided only that it 
did no wrong to another. 

That news shook Haiti with all the giddy violence 
of an earthquake. It went from mouth to mouth 
and from drum-beat to drum-beat, up into the hills 
to which had fled those who could not endure slavery. 

But. Toussaint still drove the carriage for Mon- 
sieur Libertat of the plantation Bréda. 


Memory, starting like a tiny bubble in the bowl 
of a pipe, expanded until I saw in it the reflection of 
the years between 1758 and 1803. 

Again there was a horror in the Place d’Armes of 
the Cape. 

Vincent Ogé, a young mulatto—a quateron—whose 
mother owned a coffee plantation near Dondon, had 
been in Paris during those inspiring early months of 
the Revolution when the hopes of Haitian men of 
color had risen to the stars. Ogé had seen those 
hopes shattered. ‘‘I begin,” he said to an English 
friend, ‘““I begin not to care whether the National 
Assembly admit us or not. But let it beware. We 
will no longer continue to be held in a degraded 
light. . . . Our own arms shall make us respect- 
able and independent.” 

In this agitated mood Ogé returned to Haiti. 
He wrote to the authorities at the Cape demanding 


214 Black Haiti 


that they put into effect the decision of the Assem- 
bly that all men, regardless of color, should be eli- 
gible for whatever positions they were qualified. 
Getting no satisfactory answer he organized a small 
band of free men of color, at the head of which he 
and his friend Chevannes marched upon the Cape. 
Of course, the mad little enterprise was crushed. 

It was time, the Colonists considered, for another 
lesson. Otherwise who could tell where things 
might end? In such a crisis there must be an ex- 
ample. The military tribunal which sat upon the 
case decreed that Ogé and Chevannes be broken 
upon the wheel; publicly in the place d’Armes. 

Thus in the Place d’Armes where I had remem- 
bered Mackandal I had also to remember Ogé: 
to remember the wheel and the cry for mercy; for 
Ogé was young and had known the soft life of Paris 
provided by a mother who owned a coffee planta- 
tion. I had to remember that when it was all over 
the heads of Ogé and of Chevannes had been exposed 
to view along the road which leads out of the Cape. 

It was a lesson, the Colonists said; but to shocked 
grey-black faces looking on, and to those who would 
later hear every detail while drums beat in the synco- 
pation of Africa, the Colonists were teaching nothing 
more than the lengths to which human cruelty 
may go. 

It was in February that Ogé died, and still Tous- 


The First of the Blacks 215 


saint, ‘‘silent, prudent and impenetrable,’’ was driv- 
ing the horses of Monsieur Libertat. 

But notwithstanding the lessons and the concu- 
bines, no Colonist was able any longer to feel safe. 
In July there was an uprising among the slaves of the 
western province. 

Yet Toussaint made no outward move. For a 
month longer he held the reins, driving the carriage 
in and out of the Cape, listening now, not to chatter 
of French frivolities, but to frightened talk, often 
hushed because it was recollected that one could 
not be too cautious. 

Then Toussaint did something not infrequent 
among the slaves of Haiti—he arranged quietly for 
the safe departure of Libertat and his family. And 
when they had gone, he laid down the reins of the 
coachman, which were never again to slip through 
his hands. 


It was August and in the forest of Bois Caiman 
not far from the Cape, slaves were assembling; two 
hundred delegates representing all the plantations 
of the plain were gathering. 

It was August and rain fell heavily upon the roof 
of the jungle and dripped steadily from the lower 
branches. There was the crash of thunder, the sharp 
hiss of lightning, the thud of falling trees. In the 
black night of the tempest the torches made but a 


216 Black Haiti 


glimmer of uncertain light, wavering like torches 
reflected in some dark and gloomy pool. 

Suddenly there appeared before the startled eyes 
of the assemblage the towering figure of a huge 
negress. For more than a hundred years it has been 
told how her eyes flashed, how she carried in her 
hand a long pointed knife, and how she whirled it 
about above her head while she intoned one of the 
inherited songs of Africa, and how all at once the 
delegates became aware of the presence of a shad- 
owy chorus who chanted the refrain as they pros- 
trated themselves to the wet earth. The women 
brought with them a black pig; black as the night 
and as the two hundred delegates. It has been told 
that the pig was with much ceremony sacrificed 
and that on their knees all drank the hot blood, 
vowing to consecrate themselves to insurrection. 

And among those who drank and vowed there 
was the slave who had read Abbé Raynal; an old man 
who could remember Mackandal and the influence 
of his reputed magic upon dark groping minds. 

Toussaint knew well the effect of that ceremony of 
the oath of blood. He knew how dramatically the 
tale of it would be repeated, passed from mouth to 
mouth. He knew that the timid would draw from 
it courage and faith. Perhaps—notwithstanding the 
luminous thoughts hidden in books—Toussaint did 
more than play upon the superstitions of those he 





A peasant in the regal manner. 





The First of the Blacks 217 


would liberate; perhaps he too drew a measure of 
strength from the hypnotic chant, and from the 
warm gushing blood. 

They drank. And eight days later, from the 
north, the east, the west and the south of the plain 
there sounded the drums. They severed the still- 
ness of sleep, and nothing.in Haiti was ever again to 
be the same. On one side of that melancholy and 
mysterious drum-call there lay the Colonists’ Haiti; 
the Haiti where white had lived upon the life and 
the sweat of the black. On the other side of the 
vibrant summons, lay the agony of the most terrible 
struggle for freedom which the world has ever seen. 

The drums beat, not soft whispering drums like the 
old call to secret conclave, not seductive like the call 
to the dance; but fiercely loud, with small regard to 
rhythm, for the hands upon the goat-skins trembled 
with the knowledge of what was that night to be 
done. 

And at their clamor the slaves rose shouting ‘‘ Lib- 
erté! Liberté! Vengeance!”’ 


Twelve to one the blacks outnumbered the whites 
who had enslaved them, who had driven them to 
toil beyond their strength. Twelve to one they 
now rose in obedience to the oath of blood sworn 
by their leaders. They rose remembering all the 
“‘lessons”’ they had been taught. They did not 


218 Black Haiti 


forget the floggings nor the flames nor the torture. 
For when they rose they cried ‘‘ Vengeance!”’ 

Each man had had to provide himself with arms 
as best a slave might. They had knives and hatch- 
ets and clubs. That was the best they could do. 
Those who lacked weapons used their torches to 
set fire to the fields of sugar-cane, to the mills and 
to the mansions of their owners. 


When I dreamed in the plaza of the Cape Cathe- 
dral these things would pass vividly through my 
mind in uninterrupted flow of memory. Indeed the 
life of the plaza stimulated such memory. When 
there chanced to be in the harbor a sailing vessel from 
santo Domingo its sailors came to loaf in the square 
and their speech was a reminder that in the days of 
Spanish dominion over the Santo Domingo portion 
of the island, Toussaint was for a time enlisted 
under Spain; getting from the Spanish that prac- 
tical military training which he knew to be essen- 
tial in the task before him. 

As arule, however, there were only Haitians in the 
plaza, and their going and coming was a study in 
the part which feet play in civilization. Of the pass- 
ing Haitians some wore shoes easily, unconsciously, 
as though their ancestors had been shod; others 
walked as though shoes were recent and clumsy 
acquisitions, which when they became unbearable, 


The First of the Blacks 219 


they removed and carried over the shoulder, or 
perched upon the head; while many of the feet 
padding softly through the square had never known 
a shoe. 

Once begin with shoes and the simple life is done 
for. The whole scale of living is altered; shoes 
being in themselves so staggeringly costly to a 
people whose daily expenditure for food falls well 
below nine cents. With a budget of something like 
two dollars a month for food the price of a pair of 
shoes looks dizzy. And the worst of it is that they 
are but an insidious beginning; almost certain to 
lead one day to stockings and then inexorably rais- 
ing the standard for everything else. Surely the ser- 
pent crawling out of the garden smiled wickedly 
at the thought that the apple would lead to shoes 
and shoes to material enslavement. 

In the plaza of the Cape all—whether shod or 
unshod—had in common a certain proud sadness, as 
though all were conscious that they incarnated the 
failure of those big dreams which Toussaint and 
Christophe had held for them. All seemed op- 
pressed by the one thing which has the power to 
sadden their race. In the face of poverty they 
can be merry. They can forget suffering and forgive 
physical cruelty, but nothing in them rises above 
the crushing weight of contempt; for contempt 
breaks the soul upon the wheel. 


220 Black Haiti 


I always found this heartache in the Cathedral 
square. Some day the race will wake to a realiza- 
tion of their own beautiful genius, in whose com- 
plete flowering there will be produced a strangely 
lovely blossom not before seen in the hot-house of 
civilization. 

And then in the plaza one will not so inevitably re- 
call the tragic march of events which followed fast 
upon the first black uprising in Haiti. 

Events came swiftly to the man who had been 
for half a century a slave, and for whom the rest of 
life was now so curiously to be interwoven with 
what was happening in Europe. Perhaps but for 
Europe he might have gone on quietly to the grave, 
dreaming his great dream and driving the carriage 
of Monsieur Libertat. But there had been a French 
Revolution, and an Ogé to dramatize it for Haiti. 
Toussaint’s hour had been struck for him. He had 
been as it were pushed overboard, plunged into 
reality. 

An old coachman, nearing sixty, must learn to 
fight and to manage men instead of horses. And 
while he learned, the desperate Colonists plotted, 
imploring Britain to annex Haiti and to deliver 
them from the principles of the French Revolution. 

When Toussaint, General Toussaint he was now, 
learned that France had officially abolished slavery 
in all her colonies, he deserted Spain and came over 


The First of the Blacks 221 


to the aid of General Laveaux; bringing with him 
4,000 well-trained blacks. He saved the day for 
the French, at that time pressed on one side by the 
Spanish, and with the British firmly established in 
most of the coast towns. But before the vigor of 
Toussaint both the Spanish and the British forces 
fell back. Laveaux was amazed, jubilant and grate- 
ful; he made him Lieutenant-Governor; General of 
a division; and after a brilliant victory, appointed 
him General-in-Chief of the Army. A _ gold-em- 
broidered hat with plumes now surmounted the yel- 
low turban of the old slave days. 

Then all at once the French began to fear this 
slave who, in five years’ time, had received such 
honors at their own hands. What ambitions, they 
reasoned, might this man not be cherishing? His 
spectacular rise was alarming. They sent out a 
new Governor whose secret mission was to restrain 
Toussaint. 

Toussaint was making commercial treaties with 
Britain. It was with Toussaint, over the very head 
of the French, that General Maitland was arranging 
the British evacuation. ‘Toussaint was being pre- 
sented with a silver service in the name of Eng- 
land’s King. General Maitland was marching his 
troops in review before this ex-slave, in whose honor 
bells were rung and salutes fired. Toussaint was 
making a triumphal entry into the Cape and a white 


222 Black Haiti 


woman was placing a crown of laurel on his head 
and comparing him to Napoleon. 

Napoleon! That name had flamed in the slave 
imagination. Napoleon who had climbed from the 
obscurity of a poor Corsican boy to high power. 
His career was to fire men like Toussaint and Dessa- 
lines. His achievements spurred to action the starv- 
ing ego of slaves. 

Yes, the Haitian leaders must be curbed. Of that 
France was convinced. And the simplest way to 
accomplish it was to foster the jealousy between the 
black General Toussaint and his mulatto rival, 
General Rigaud. Let them cut each other’s throats. 
France could then step in and resume control of 
what remained. That policy devastated Haiti by 
four years of racial war. 

Toussaint had already proved the military possi- 
bilities of his race. From slaves he had manufac- 
tured troops before which Britain and France and 
Spain often went down to defeat. He was now to 
show that he had learned statesmanship and diplo- 
macy. He knew how to get objectionable French 
officials elected Deputies as a means of shipping them 
back to France and out of the way of his ambitions 
and his visions. He knew how to draw the lines 
about them until they were compelled to turn to 
him for protection. He had the gift of analyzing 
men. Of his rival, Rigaud, he said, ‘‘I might have 


The First of the Blacks 223 


him stopped, but God keep me from it. I need 
Monsieur Rigaud. He is violent. He suits me to 
make war with. The mulatto caste is higher than 
mine. If I did away with Monsieur Rigaud they 
might perhaps find a better man. He is violent. 
He lets his horse go when he gallops. He shows his 
arm when he strikes. I gallop too, but I curb; and 
when I strike, men feel but do not see.”’ 

Toussaint had become a statesman! When the 
civil war was brought to an end it was therefore 
Toussaint who was master of Haiti. He had now 
to prepare for what he knew must come. He knew 
that he must be ready for Napoleon. Contemplat- 
ing the superhuman task of equipping his impover- 
ished country for the crisis of contest the tired old 
man must often have had to repeat to himself the 
words of his inspiration. 

Fate gave him two years in which to make ready, 
and in which to demonstrate how great an admin- 
istrator a negro may be. 

Unceasingly active, Toussaint was everywhere. 
The rich soil was made to produce to its limit. 
Vagabonds were arrested and punished. Idleness 
was not tolerated. ‘“‘Liberty,’’ he said, ‘‘cannot 
subsist without toil.’ That was not an ingratiat- 
ing doctrine to preach to slaves worn out with labor 
and exhausted by war, but under Toussaint’s enthu- 
siasm they toiled anew. ‘Toussaint found time to 


224 Black Haiti 


establish schools, for he was looking, not only to the 
coming contest, not only to the preservation of his 
own power, but to the far future of his race. Out 
of the depleted public funds young men were sent 
to France for further education. He would elevate 
his people to be the equal of any. 

Toussaint’s rule was one of efficient tyranny, exer- 
cised to promote what he believed to be the good of 
his country. Discipline was severe and the new- 
won liberty bore a strange resemblance to tyranny: 
freedom to shift from one employer to another being 
forbidden the tillers of the land, and only that religion 
sanctioned by Toussaint being permitted. Knowing 
the influence of the nocturnal dances, Toussaint out- 
lawed them, and under him the priesthood of the 
Voodoo was persecuted. While in the schools only 
that which he approved was taught. 

It was tyranny, but what other form of govern- 
ment could be conceived by a man who had been 
more than half a hundred years a slave? And then 
there was no time for experimentation. Napoleon’s 
fleet would soon be coming and Haiti must be 
ready. Toussaint had to manufacture a govern- 
ment from slaves, as he had out of slaves made an 
army. 

He had always that desperate sense of haste. He 
must think of everything; foresee everything; omit 
nothing that might in that dreadful hour which was 


The First of the Blacks 225 


ever nearer, be of strength or protection to the feeble 
bewildered Haiti. 

To the whites he was friendly. They would be 
of priceless value as hostages when he had Napoleon 
to face. He accordingly invited them to return to 
the Colony and restored to them their estates. In 
his selection of public officers he appointed only 
honest and capable men, with always the prefer- 
ence given to a white over a black. He won the 
friendship of the government of President Adams 
in the United States. His personality, his sobriety, 
his wisdom commanded respect. ‘‘His genius,”’ 
says Nemour, ‘‘was powerful and supple, open to 
all suggestions. He knew how to listen.” 

His activity was incessant: his ambition kept step 
with that of Napoleon, whose fabulous image strutted 
in the most hungry egos of the time. Fourteen 
months after Napeoleon had himself made First 
Consul, Toussaint had a constitution voted with 
himself appointed Governor for life and authorized 
to name his successor. And the numbers of his 
enemies increased. 


Familiar as I was with it all, memories sat 
with me in the square, or followed me about the 
Cape. 

Among them there came Marcus Rainsford, 
Esquire, late Captain of the Third West India Reg- 


226 Black Haiti 


iment. I shall never forget the dark winter after- 
noon when in the reference room of a Public Library 
I reached the point where Rainsford said that he had 
seen Toussaint walking on the batteries of the 
Cape. He was the first person encountered by 
Rainsford upon his landing, shipwrecked in Haiti. 
For months I had been absorbed in the’stirring story 
of Toussaint, but so far had had it only at second- 
hand. Now here was a man stepping out of the 
past saying quite naturally that upon landing he 
had seen Toussaint walking on the batteries and 
conversing with two privates. 

Suddenly I was no longer reading a yellow old 
page where the s’s were all like f’s. I was talking to 
Marcus Rainsford, late Captain of a West India 
Regiment, and he was telling me how a hurricane 
had dismasted the schooner ‘‘ Marta,” in which he 
was proceeding under orders, from Jamaica to Mar- 
tinique, and he was describing how, upon landing at 
the Cape, he had seen Toussaint. Toussaint had 
broken off his talk with the privates and come over 
to inquire of Rainsford “‘whence he came and what 
was his destination.’’ And Rainsford was explain- 
ing to me how, the English being still looked upon 
with suspicion in Haiti, he decided to pass himself 
off as an American. 

He was telling me how astonished he was at the 
numbers of Americans in the city and at the atten- 


The First of the Blacks 227 


tion paid to their commerce. He found that in his 
rdle of shipwrecked American sailor even the women 
whom he met on his way to the hotel made friendly 
advances to him. ‘‘But,’’ he confided, ‘‘I was tired 
and went at once to the hotel . . . an edifice of 
rather elegant appearance.” ‘There he was amazed 
that officers and privates, the Colonel and the 
drummer, all ate indiscriminately at the same table, 
and that even Toussaint never sat at the head: the 
idea being that “hours of reflection and relaxation 
should not be damped by the affected forms of the 
old régime.’ 

He was surprised also to find many Haitians liv- 
ing in what he considered a ‘‘sumptuous style,” 
their houses ‘‘furnished with a luxe beyond that of 
the most voluptuous European.” The “etiquette 
of life,’’ he said, was ‘‘extended to a degree scarcely 
to be conceived.”’ 

Rainsford was soon no longer tired; the women 
were ‘‘sensible and polite, frequently elegant and 
engaging.’”’ He was impressed with their ‘‘con- 
scious ease, with their gazeté du ceur’’; and struck 
by the fact that they never spoke of their former 
circumstances. 

So in his chatter of the elegant and the sumptuous 
did he hit upon something significant. It is clear 
that those citizens of the Cape dared not remember 
the things which all had seen and heard and known; 


228 Black Haiti 


clear that they would forget, that they would be ele- 
gant and gay. 

‘Only,’ said Rainsford, ‘‘when the defence of 
country was mentioned did the careless manner 
disappear while every eye was filled with fire and 
every tongue shouted ‘Victory!’”’ 


Sitting in the Cathedral plaza, past which whirled 
and flashed the motors of 1925, | remembered Cape 
Haiti as this shipwrecked British soldier saw it a 
hundred and twenty-five years ago, when Toussaint 
was at the peak of his power; Rainsford showing 
me that there was gaiety of heart while Toussaint 
ceaselessly prepared for that fleet which was so 
soon to come. 


I found little in the Cape to prick this bubble of 
memory. ‘The hotel soon became a matter of the 
routine of meals and of sleep. The motors came 
and went so quickly as to be scarcely an intrusion. 
But the Marine Corps barracks, erected on the site 
of the slave market where probably Mackandal and 
Toussaint’s father had been put up at auction . . 
the barracks could not be thus ignored. Breaking 
into the remembered anguish of the birth of black 
liberty in Haiti, they aroused an overwhelming com- 
passion for the descendants of the Independence. 
The dreams had been so fine and their practical 
realization so difficult! The inevitable reaction 


The First of the Blacks 229 


from slavery had made of self-government an even 
more baffling problem than we have found it. 

So the proud sadness of the Cape stands among 
dead dreams, as its houses stand among ruins, while 
in front of the barracks a Marine walks up and down; 
doing sentry duty under a sun for which Nature has 
not designed him. 

He is a new-comer, for he is pale under his khaki- 
colored felt hat. He paces, turns at the end of his 
beat, slightly shifts the weight of the gun on his 
shoulder; paces and turns; back and forth. Drops 
of moisture stand out on his forehead and slowly 
trickle down the smooth pallor of his cheeks. 

‘‘Join the Marines and see the World”’ the poster 
had shouted on the corner of 42nd Street and Sixth 
Avenue. And on a wintry day it was natural to 
pause and look at photographs of palm trees. As 
for seeing the world, who doing the civilized eight- 
hour day at a desk would not see the world? 

‘‘Join the Marines and see the Girls’”’ the slogan 
has been burlesqued. 

The slender boy in khaki paces, turns and shifts 
his gun. He will go that night to the Marine Corps 
free movie. He hopes the picture will be good; so 
often it is not. But still he will go, for there 
isn’t another goddam thing to do. It will be cool 
then, at the hour when in their peacock blues, their 
cerise and their jade, the girls of the Cape flutter 


230 Black Haiti 


about the street corners, or stand solitary in the 
night waiting for life. 


And in the eternal flow of life my memory concen- 
trated, curiously limited to the heart of the struggle 
to be free, to the years between Mackandal and the 
death of Toussaint. Memory drifted back from the 
Marine Corps boy to Napoleon’s fleet, at last arriv- 
ing, just as Toussaint had all along known that it 
would. 

It came, bringing 20,000 of the veterans of the 
Rhine and the Pyramids. 

‘“We must perish!” cried Toussaint. ‘‘All France 
is coming. She comes to take vengeance, and to 
enslave the blacks!” 

But Toussaint never knew that the invincible 
Napoleon had himself laid down the plan of that 
campaign, the command of which he had intrusted 
to his brother-in-law, Leclerc. In Paris the victory 
was felt so assured that Napoloen’s sister Pauline 
had sailed with her husband. 

Meanwhile the secret orders were explicit. The 
conquest was to fall into three periods. In the first, 
which was to consume not more than twenty days, 
Leclerc should occupy the coast towns; but only 
those blacks who rebelled were to be disarmed. In 
that period Leclerc was to treat with Toussaint; 
promising him everything he asked; confirming him 


The First of the Blacks 231 


in his position; flattering and heaping favors upon all 
his officers. He was then to reconstruct the Colony 
along the old lines, but without slavery. 

In the second period he was to destroy all scat- 
tered bands of resisting negroes: and in the third he 
was to become more exacting. There must be gen- 
eral disarmament; the influence of Toussaint and 
his black officers was to be undermined. 

But the smashing of organized resistance cost 
Leclerc half his men. He had forced the black gen- 
erals to capitulate, but he did not dare proceed with 
the disarmament. The rainy season had come on 
and with it yellow fever. In the barracks rows of 
corpses waited for the death-cart; men were dying 
at the rate of 160 a day. And the reinforcements 
which Napoleon sent were no longer veterans. 

Toussaint had retired with his family to a plan- 
tation near Ennery, but Leclerc knew that he but 
waited. Fear of the ‘‘old negro who seemed to 
have a commission from Heaven’’ obsessed Leclerc. 

Toussaint watched the progress of the fever and 
waited. But in his heart there were moments of 
bitterness. Toussaint had always leaned upon his 
God. He had been convinced that he had been 
divinely chosen to free his people, and he had pro- 
tected the church in Haiti at a time when it was 
being persecuted in France. His important declara- 
tions had been made always from the pulpit; and 


232 Black Haiti 


never had he failed to celebrate victory with a Te 
Deum. Now his God was sending reinforcements 
to Leclerc. 

But Leclerc was not concerned with the despair 
in Toussaint’s heart. Fear of the man haunted the 
French General. And then there were his orders 
from Napoleon: for the secret instructions had said 
that in the third period Toussaint and all his officers 
should be sent to France if they had behaved well; 
if they had behaved ill they were to go to Corsica. 

Leclere must at least deliver Toussaint. But 
the man must be secured without arousing the 
blacks. Orders to that effect were passed on to 
General Brunet. 

To Toussaint, mourning desertion by his God, 
there came one day a letter from this General Brunet 
—such a kind letter! He wanted, he said, to arrange 
a conference with General Toussaint; he wished to 
talk over with him conditions in his district; there 
were administrative matters about which he desired 
his advice. And he would be delighted if Madame 
Toussaint would accompany him. Indeed he would 
be glad to send his own horses for her convenience. 
And he assured Toussaint that in his home he would 
find the sincerity of a friend and of an honest man. 

‘“There is treachery in the letter,’ urged Tous- 
saint’s friends. But the heart of the slave who had 
achieved and lost supreme power, refused to believe. 


The First of the Blacks 233 


The heart rejoiced. He was needed: the white men 
were beginning to appreciate all he had done; they 
had sent for him; could not get on without him. 

‘“‘It is treachery,’”’ the friends persisted. 

But no, that could not be. his heart would not 
admit that. Thus Toussaint who had a hundred 
times shrewdly out-manoeuvred the enemy, not 
only on the battlefield but in diplomacy—Toussaint 
who had seen so keenly into the character of Rigaud, 
Toussaint rode into this trap cunningly baited with 
flattery and cordiality. | 

In the house of General Brunet, his sincere friend, 
soldiers waited to arrest him, and to ship him to 
France. But behind him Toussaint left prophetic 
words. ‘‘By my overthrow,” he said, ‘the trunk 
of the tree of liberty in Saint Domingue is laid low, 
but only the trunk; it will shoot out again from the 
roots for they are many and deep.” 


On the margin of the bay of Cape Haiti a long 
flight of stairs lead from the water to the terraced 
ruins of Pauline’s palace. There is a spot where, 
looking through the crumbling walls you see a frag- 
ment of sky outlined in jutting masonry. This 
bit of sky they tell you is Pauline in silhouette. 

It is this Pauline who is the tradition of the pal- 
ace; petite blue-eyed Pauline with hair of spun 
amber, and a voluptuous little mouth set in a face 


234 Black Haiti 


of such rare beauty that Canova, the famed Italian 
artist, had reproduced it in his statue of Venus. 
Pauline is the wilful petulant ghost who loved lux- 
ury and affectation, who would always be surrounded 
by splendor and always amused by painters and buf- 
foons and musicians, but especially by flirtations. 
She’d not wanted to come to Haiti, but Napoleon 
had been obdurate. It pleased him to get Leclerc 
out of Paris. He did not fancy a brother-in-law 
modestly born in the little village of Pantoise, with 
the villagers everlastingly turning up in Paris and 
announcing themselves related by marriage to the 
first Consul’s sister. So Napoleon had put Leclerc 
in charge of the Santo Domingo campaign. He’d 
shown courage and energy in the Alps and on the 
Rhine: but he was incapable of initiation . . . an 
imitator always. Still—with exact instructions, 
with nothing to do but carry out the schemes orig- 
inated in a Napoleonic brain—he should be success- 
ful. In fact how could he fail? Therefore Pauline, 
in spite of her poutings and pleadings, was to go too. 

And Pauline became the talk of the Cape. Miss 
Hassall, writing those frank letters to Aaron Burr, 
says that the town talked of nothing but Madame 
Leclerc. Miss Hassall was neither a catty nor a 
prudish woman. ‘‘Envy and ill nature,’’ she wrote, 
‘“pursue Madame Leclerc because she is charming 
and surrounded by pleasure.”’ 


The First of the Blacks 235 


She went to see Pauline and found her in white 
muslin, with a madras handkerchief coquettishly 
twisted about the aura of her hair: found her 
lounging on a sofa in a room darkened by Venetian 
blinds. General Boyer sat at her feet and the little 
lady with an air of supreme languor amused him 
by letting her slipper fall; permitting the fascinat- 
ing general to replace it, and then letting it fall 
again. She was SO very bored and so very lovely. 
Miss Hassall quite lost her heart and generously 
wrote Aaron Burr about this enchanting Pauline 
who kept all the gossips of the Cape busy some 
hundred and twenty-five years ago. 

This is the Pauline who is the tradition of the 
palace; the Pauline who flirted and made festive 
while each day yellow fever claimed 160 deaths 
among the French forces commanded by her hus- 
band. Pauline flirted and when hope was gone 
sailed away to safety, yet it is she who is the pop- 
ular ghost of the palace by the bay. 

But in my memory Leclerc also lives on among 
the ruins: for there he wrote the distracted letters 
which continue the story of the tragic years. 

Hour after hour he sat writing in the palace, with 
the sound of rushing and receding waves beating 
monotonously on his consciousness. Blind to the 
beauty of nights when the mounting moon silvered 
the blue-black sky and the blue-black bay; oblivious 


236 Black Haiti 


to the enchantment of the silver foam breaking upon 
the shoal of La Trompeuse, the shoal of Le Grand 
Mouton and upon the Mardi Gras Reef; blind to it 
all, Leclerc hour after hour sat writing. 

Rochambeau had come with 10,000 troops, but 
there had come also news of Napoleon’s intention 
to restore slavery. 

In terrified despair Leclerc wrote: 


The rebellion grows. The disease continues. In the 
present insurrection these men may be killed but they 
will not surrender. They laugh at death and with their 
women it is the same. . . . You must no longer count 
upon the moral force I used tohave. . . . I begged you, 
Citizen Consul, to do nothing to make these people 
fear for their liberty till the moment when I should be 
prepared. 

I can do nothing more by persuasion; I can only use 
force, and force I have none. 

Was there ever a general obliged to calculate on the 
death of four-fifths of his army and the uselessness of 
the rest, through lack of money? . . . Ought I, under 
these circumstances, to have expected your law on 
the slave-trade? 


Desperately, feverishly, Leclerc drove his pen, 
his small, delicate figure bent over his desk: 


Since terror alone remains, terror I employ— 


No, there was no beauty in the night for Leclerc, 
despairing; alternately burning and shaking with 


The First of the Blacks 237 


malaria. His grace of manner, his vivacity, were 
gone. 


In bitter sorrow [he wrote] I see all that I have so far 
done on the verge of annihilation. . . 


He would not even have been aware of the click 
of Pauline’s heels on the terrace, nor of the light 
laughter with which she answered an Officer—who 
might that very night be struck down by the swift 
hand of yellow fever. 

And Pauline would have gone alone into her dress- 
ing room where sofas and curtains of blue silk were 
trimmed with silver fringe, and alone into her room 
where over her bed hung a canopy in the shape of 
a shell, from which Cupids held back with one hand 
the satin curtains, while with the other they pointed 
to the great mirror. On the table was an alabaster 
figure of silence with a finger on its lips and in the 
other hand a wax taper. 

The taper showed Pauline herself in the big mirror. 

In the Cape raged that mysterious disease; no one 
in those days knew how it was contracted, nor knew 
any cure for it. Sometimes brigands attacked. 
Negroes surrounded the town. Three had been 
burned for setting fire to one of the plantations. 
Vaguely one comprehended all this. 

But Pauline was a fairy reflected in the candle-lit 
mirror. And Miss Hassall had written her friend 


238 Black Haiti 


Colonel Burr that General Boyer had a face, a fig- 
ure and a voice that were irresistible. Miss Hassall 
gossiped, but without malice. 

In the silk-hung bedroom it was hot. Would the 
fever spare the fairy in the mirror? 

Pauline used to say ‘‘These are our last moments. 
Let us pass them in joy.” 

But still Leclerc’s weary hand wrote: 


Citizen Consul, if you could but have seen the diffi- 
culties of all sorts that I had conquered and the results 
I had obtained, you would tremble with me at sight of 
my position today. 


Toussaint had been deported in June. The news 
of the restoration of slavery had come in July. 
During September 4,000 of Leclerc’s men were taken 
by fever. In November he wrote that last desper- 
ate, violent letter, and in November he too, died of 
yellow fever. 


In the mountain fortress of Joux on the Swiss fron- 
tier Toussaint also wrote to Napoleon. 

‘“Toussaint Louverture must not be at liberty,” 
Leclerc had urged. ‘‘Imprison him far within the 
Republic. . . . You cannot keep him at too great 
a distance from the sea, nor in a place too sure.” 

Thus it was from a cell in the fortress of Joux that 
Toussaint wrote. 


The First of the Blacks 239 


He recounted the conditions under which he had 
been taken; the false assurances of General Brunet. 
He appealed as ‘‘The First of the Blacks to the First 
of the Whites,” and begged for an honest trial of his 
case. 

And in the solitary confinement of his cell he 
awaited an answer. 

But the only response was the coming of a man 
sent by Napoleon to extract from him information 
about hidden treasure. 

‘“‘Other things I have Jlost,’’ mourned Toussaint, 
‘‘of greater value than treasure.”’ 

One day the keeper took away his razor, and it is 
rumored in that history which is not strictly docu- 
mented, that Toussaint’s sad comment was, ‘‘I have 
been misjudged if I am thought to be lacking in the 
courage to support my sorrow.” 

To an old negro bred in the sun the cell at Joux 
was incredibly chill, hopelessly dreary. He who had 
been born to sunshine waited in cold. For what? 
For an answer from The First of the Whites. 

But such as Napoleon only laugh at the beseech- 
ing of those in their power. And Napoleon, again 
at war, with the British fleet blockading Haiti and 
with Leclerc writing those irritating letters,— 
Napoleon needed a joke. And so he must have 
laughed the mirthless laugh of hate—in which the 
lower jaw is dropped and the lips drawn back from 


240 Black Haiti 


the teeth in a snarl—laughed, while Toussaint, 
waiting, grew feebler with the empty passing days. 

Shivering in the dungeon of the fortress, he had 
all the hours there were in which to think. . 

Where had he sinned? ‘Toussaint would have 
been sure to ask himself whether the cell at Joux were 
not the chastisement of God, for Toussaint’s God 
was the direct sort who punishes sin. Where then 
had he sinned? 

The vision had been so clear; he had been the 
man who was to have raised his people to the equal 
of any. Only a great man could have been called 
by God. And hadn’t a white woman once put a 
wreath on his head and called him the Bonaparte 
of Haiti? So had he risen—from a slave of the plan- 
tation Bréda to be the First of the Blacks. But was 
that a sin? Hadn’t Napoleon risen too—from no- 
thing? And wasn’t he blessed of God—powerful 
and honored? 

Surely Napoleon would understand and answer. 
But the months passed. 

Oh, he knew now the folly of trusting Brunet’s 
‘““Come. . . . And if Madame, whose acquaint- 
ance I am most anxious to make, if Madame will 
come, I will send my horses.”’ | 

Madame Toussaint, his good wife Suzanne,— 
what had become of her? And of his sons? They 
too had been deported. . . . they were somewhere 


The First of the Blacks 241 


in that strange France, but he did not know 
where. 

They had taken away also his dear loyal servant, 
Mars Plaisir. And he might not hear from any of 
them. He would never hear again. 

To Napoleon, Toussaint was but a revolted slave 
of supreme impertinence, who must be punished ac- 
cording to his presumption. To Leclerc, he had 
been the man most to be feared, who could not 
be kept in a place too sure. 

Therefore his confinement was solitary and he 
must on no account be permitted communication 
with his people. 

So, in the cold waiting silence, he learned the per- 
fidy of Brunet’s “‘Come.”’ 

Of course it had been folly to trust, but then had 
not Brunet assured him of sincerity and friendship? 
It could not have been a sin to trust. 

Often he must have lain awake, too cold to sleep. 
Water dripped in his cell as it had dripped from the 
branches in the forest on the night of the “‘oath of 
blood.” How soggy with rain had been the floor 
of the jungle! His feet had been cold, but not so 
cold as at Joux where there would never be any sun 
to warm them. 

With his ebbing strength there must have pulsed 
in his ears the rhythmic murmur of weakness; some- 
thing murmuring in his ears like the chant of ne- 


242 Black Haiti 


gresses singing the song of Africa . . . very far 
away—loin, loin, loin. . . . 


Leclerc had been six months dead. It was April 
in the year 1803, the year which was always the 
climax of my remembering at the Cape. It was 
April and there was still snow in the valleys of the 
Jura mountains on the Swiss frontier. In their des- 
olate cottages, the charcoal burners of the mountains 
huddled about their fires. But in the cell of the 
fortress there was only the chill of death. There 
a dead man sat beside a cold and empty stove. His 
head had fallen forward and his hands were stiff on 
his knees. He was a little man, shrunken with age 
until he would not have measured above five feet. 
He was a negro, and on his right hand the little 
finger curled back in a semi-circle. 


PRIEST-HOUSE AND PALACE 


I 


A BEARDED priest opened the door; gowned and 
bearded in black. The light of the kerosene lamp 
burning in the room behind him was blinding after 
miles of stars. Against its light the priest stood 
abnormally tall and abnormally black—a figure with- 
out apparent depth, as flat as a shadow, and, like a 
shadow, hazy in outline; a figure surrounded by the 
luminous aura whose source was a kerosene lamp. 

Bewildered, the priest looked into the dark. It is 
probable that we were the first motorists ever to 
knock at that hour upon his door; for the priest lived 
in Milot, and Milot is seldom visited by motor, while 
only in a moment of caprice would one deliberately 
choose to travel its road by night. 

So the priest hesitated while we solicited hospi- 
tality. We had cots, a servant, food. We asked 
only space in which to set up the cots. But he must 
not feel it imperative to take us in for we were 
provided with a tent in case of emergency. 

Oh yes, he would make us welcome, though he did 

243 


244 Black Haiti 


not remember that travellers had ever before come 
at night. 

I was then suddenly aware that with the passing 
years a knock in the night must have gradually 
associated itself with the administering of the last 
rites of the Church. The sound must have been 
instantly correlated in the priest’s mind with the 
insignia of such an occasion—the Cross, the Wafer, 
the censer and the robes. Incense would have per- 
fumed the picture. The scene would swiftly have 
staged itself within the walls of a thatch-roofed 
room, lit by flaring bougies stuck here and there 
according to need. And Death would be there, 
hovering about some dark prostrate body. 

We had knocked and that familiar scene must 
instantly have been called up from memory. 

Possibly the priest had in mind some particular 
person who was sufficiently ill to account for such a 
summons, and with that knowledge he would have 
identified the prostrate form and accordingly placed 
it on coconut mat or mahogany as the case might be. 

Thus the priest had been bewildered, finding 
strangers at the door, asking shelter for their cots. 
But of course he would welcome them: it was an 
event in the routine of Milot, where he was the only 
white in the place. 

We entered, and I felt that we brought with us the 
intoxication of the night. We brought a sense of 


Priest-House and Palace 245 


three black rivers cautiously forded; of a dark lofty 
forest where frogs called unto frogs, and where one 
startled squawk had been wrung from the heart of 
an invisible heron. The cool fresh night air had 
entered with us, and the memory of little villages; the 
village where light had oozed from between the 
rattan slats of walls; the dark village where some one 
had called gaily, ‘‘Never mind, we’ll have an auto- 
mobile next year!’”’ And then the village where, 
discovering that we were lost, we had stopped for 
information. Although it was still early in the even- 
ing this village was loudly snoring in little huts closed 
to the sweet night air. But we had aroused a citizen 
who would see us on our way. He had stumbled 
sleepily ahead over what only subsequent daylight 
convinced us was really the incredible road to Milot. 

Into the light of the priest’s house we brought this 
sense of our night ride. 

We had not had supper? The priest would call 
his cook, and his cook thereupon rose up from the 
corner of an outer room, She would fry eggs and 
brew for us orange-leaf tea; very good when you 
were tired. ‘‘They have many teas, these people.’’ 

And while we ate, the priest would hear how we 
had managed to get over the road at night, and 
WEL Villar ts hi 

Yes, we knew it to be customary to take the early 
train which upon certain days of the week left the 


246 Black Haiti 


Cape for its brief run to Bahon. We knew about 
leaving the train at Kilometer 17, and about the 
necessity of arranging to be met there by horses— 

Then had we not been told of the condition of the 
toad? 

We confessed to knowing that also. It had been 
merely our whim to motor by night from the Cape 
to Milot. But, though we’d been repeatedly stuck 
on horizontal ridges of earth, where the car had 
balanced itself, refusing either to back or to go for- 
ward; though in many spots we’d had to make our 
road as we advanced, bringing stones for filling, 
cutting and laying branches—still we wouldn’t have 
missed that ride. 

So with tales of the road we amused the priest 
while we drank the fragrant tea which is compounded 
of orange leaves, hot water, sugar, and Haitian rum; 
and with the talk our acute sense of the night re- 
ceded; our eyes became accustomed to the lamp-light; 
and the room acquired reality. 

We saw that two monstrous mahogany wardrobes 
housed the priest’s china and glass and silver; the 
priest’s vast linen sheets, the luxury of which he 
insisted upon adding to our cots. The table stood 
unsteadily upon a floor rotting with age and climate. 
Through first one hole and then another the priest’s 
cat bounded unexpectedly from cellar to dining 
room. Wooden shutters closed the glass-less windows, 





Little huts closed to the sweet night air. 





Priest-House and Palace 247 


but did that matter to a cat when the floor offered so 
many entrances? It was the duty of the negro child, 
Bajean, to drive the cat away. A long whip for the 
purpose stood in a corner beside the wardrobe. But 
to a young cat the driving off only added gusto to 
the return by way of the cellar and the floor. It 
was evident that this feline member of the family 
vaguely disturbed the priest, but with one dark eye 
on the intruder he continued the conversation. 

So we had come to visit the Citadel and the palace? 
Now—since the Occupation—people did occasionally 
come, but he did not as a rule meet them; it being 
their habit to take the early train out of the Cape, 
ride from Kilometer 17, spend a few minutes at the 
palace, hurry up the mountain to the Citadel and 
return by the afternoon train. He would see them 
as they rode through, that was all. They did not 
come knocking him up at night 

And the priest smiled a friendly bearded smile. 

As for the palace, we might see it now, if we 
would step outside the door. 

The moon had cast off her sombre clouds and now 





shone wanly through mist veils: and by that pale 
light we first saw the palace. The priest had indi- 
cated it by a little wave of the hand, as though by a 
gesture he had caused it to rise, a great grey mass, 
slightly silvered by the moon. It was astonishingly 
near, for the priest’s house stands at its gates. 


248 Black Haiti 


II 


To Milot the palace is stupendous. From its 
point of vantage on a slope somewhat higher than 
the village, it looks down upon rows of one-story, one- 
roomed houses, and, all things being comparative, 
it becomes to the beholder the largest palace in the 
world. The village is bamboo and thatch, its clay 
walls stained with ochre or salmon or whitened with 
lime; the palace is of brick, of cut stone and of 
carving. Room leads to room and gallery to gallery. 
Its central wing even rises to the astonishing height 
of three stories. 

If Buckingham were set upon a hillside terrace 
overlooking streets of cottages it would achieve a 
magnificence of size such as belongs to this Sans 
Souci. | 

To reach the palace we pass between the huge 
columns of the gateway. There are sentry-boxes to 
guard the entrance, but in the boxes there stand no 
soldiers, and the gate itself is gone. We cross a 
deserted unkempt courtyard to the foot of a great 
stairway, and there two more empty sentry-boxes 
permit us to pass on unchallenged. We climb to the 
landing where in front of the basin of a fountain the 
grand staircase divides, with again two sentries, to 
protect the long flights. 

How well was guarded the King of this palace! 


Priest-House and Palace 249 


Above the fountain on the landing the great facade 
of the front rises in a beauty of arched panels and 
arched entrances and columns in half-relief; with 
stepped back from the center section, the main body 
of the building, whose arched doorways multiply 
themselves in seductive repetition. 

Everywhere the red brick foundation is showing 
through, supplanting the original facing of yellow 
stucco, now apparent only here and there in areas 
of pale color gradually flaking off, and year by year 
disappearing. 

The staircase mounts to the palace and to the 
terrace, and lovely is the line and the delicate mould- 
ing of its balustrade. Under the graceful stairway 
are dungeons with iron gratings, but the dungeons are 
empty and grass grows on the steps of the staircase. 

The day is very blue and very bright, and a soft 
breeze sweeps the path of our ascent. Below, a 
young man in a short loose blue smock is running 
across the green courtyard, propelled by his two 
goats. The smock is his only garment and beneath 
it the gloss of his slender black legs gives back the 
morning sunlight. A little grey goat, bleating plain- 
tively, walks perilously on the high balustrade of the 
right stairway, and above, on the royal terrace a 
big black sow has brought sight-seeing her whole 
new litter of offspring. 

In the palace itself all is desolation: its inner 


250 Black Haiti 


stairways have crumbled out of any possible use as 
stairs; its rooms are roofless and doorless and floor- 
less. We stumble over heaps of brick and stone, 
broken and disintegrating. And from the débris 
emerge two indignant and astonished tarantulas— 
great, furry, black tarantulas. 

Everywhere trees and shrubs and vines have 
sprouted. Faded rose tints the walls of the lower 
rooms, along the base of which runs a broad band of 
deeper shade. It is possible, looking up, to see 
on the walls of the second story rusted nails which 
must once have held in place tapestries and hangings. 

Ruins ... only ruins . . . and yet of an inde- 
finable majesty and a delicate beauty—as though 
they had once been the expression of some human 
dream. 

Standing in one of the arched doors of the central 
facade, we look out above the village, through the 
embracing hills to the plain of the Cape, and to the 
distant blue line of the ocean. ‘To the right, below, 
on a level with the gates, are the circular walls of 
the Royal Chapel, the remains of its altar, and the 
vacant niches from which saints long ago departed. 
On the left, beyond the terrace with its solitary 
star-apple tree, is the north wing of the palace, 
almost obliterated by verdure. 

I cross the terrace and sit on the brick seat which 
surrounds the gnarled old trunk of the tree. The 


Priest-House and Palace 251 


apples are still green, and not yet turned that subtle 
pinkish purple to which Oswald Durand compared 
the lips of his Choucoune. 

It is very quiet in the palace and under the tree. 
Black butterflies, gold-striped, drift in a sunbeam. 
There is not even a gurgle of water dripping in the 
basin of that long-dry fountain on the stairs. It is so 
quiet that the bleating of the little grey goat on 
the balustrade, and the scurrying rustle of lizards 
will forever startle my future memory of this palace 
of Sans Souci. | 


III 


In the priest’s house life revolved with complete 
indifference to the existence of palaces. The roosters 
of Milot saw that none overslept. The priest’s cook 
served breakfast. Meals to her consisted of food, of 
whatever happened at the moment to be available. 
You were just as likely to get wine and cake for 
breakfast as coffee and eggs. And while we ate, the 
lady presided over us, dominating the table, occa- 
sionally lifting her voice to shout ‘“‘Lutétia!’’ or 
“‘Bajean!’’ In response to which there would hurry 
the small black girl or the small black boy who were 
her assistants. The cook herself was just off the 
black; one of those fractional admixtures so metic- 
ulously classified by St. Méry. She was a stout and 


252 Black Haiti 


middle-aged person from whose virtues one might 
never rest. All day she was in and out of the rooms, 
sweeping about in a long full white dress cut on the 
lines of ancestral nightgowns. She was convinced 
that she had only to speak very loud and very fast 
to make the creole patois entirely intelligible to 
strangers. Her mouth, as the peasant Saying goes, 
knew no Sunday. And she was determined, ap- 
proaching her face very close and raising her voice, 
to persuade us that the loss of a lantern was to be 
attributed to a certain merry Josef whom we had 
engaged as part of our retinue on the Citadel expe- 
dition. It was Josef, she persisted, who had pur- 
posely left our lantern by the roadside that he might 
return later and sell it. Had not the same thing 
happened to a pair of scissors belonging to herself 
and it was upon Josef that her suspicions would for- 
ever rest. Now Josef was a fascinating person of 
whom I refused to believe ill. I was even indifferent 
about the lantern, and that was incomprehensible in 
a land where manufactured articles are rare and 
costly, where the loss of a shiny new kerosene lantern 
was a monstrous calamity. 

Moving like a pendulum from house to chapel and 
from service to service the priest was only faintly 
perturbed by the energetic good will of his matronly 
major domo. For the priest’s mind was crowded 
with absorbing schemes and problems. 


Priest-House and Palace 253 


Routine ticked off the days. Roosters crowed; one 
arose; one went by a grassy path to the outdoor 
shower house; one returned to breakfast upon what- 
ever might be set before one. On an inclosed porch 
and under a nearby tree children gathered for school; 
soon their voices united in the sing-song of education 
which is the monotonous background of juvenile 
Haiti, everywhere encountered; a refrain of spelled- 
out syllables rising to the climax of complete words 
and spaced by the intake of breath. 

With long strides the Jesuit robe of the priest 
moved through the scene; a patched and rusty black 
robe, for its owner had no care for such things, his 
mind being full—between masses—of the earthly 
passion of his life. 

The priest had a turn for invention. If he could 
but some day own a radio; he would be content if 
the limit of his connection be with the adjacent 
island of Porto Rico. Meanwhile, if that might never 
be, he had the joy of his inventions. 

Had we observed that it was a waterfall which he 
had piped to supply his shower; had we noticed the 
trick by which a lever brought the pipe under the 
fall, and the perforated top of an old tin can through 
which the water was distributed; and then was it not 
clever how the lowering of the lever disconnected 
the pipe with the waterfall? 

He was proud of his solar magic lantern. The 


254 Black Haiti 


kerosene light with which his lantern was equipped 
had not projected a sufficiently bright image when 
used by day, and it was by day that he had most 
needed it, for it was then that he wanted to throw 
upon his whitewashed wall the sacred educational 
pictures by which the Faith was to be illuminated 
for children. 

The priest must therefore make use of the sun; he 
devised a mirror on a rotating stand which he set 
up on the terrace behind the house. A hole was 
bored in the back door. Cords and pulleys connected 
the priest inside with the mirror on the terrace. The 
audience was assembled; the room darkened; the 
picture slipped into place; the sun duly shone upon 
the mirror which in turn reflected the beam through 
the hole in the door and into the lens of the lantern, 
the cords rotating the mirror controlled the position 
of the light. And there on the white wall opposite 
the door there were displayed to the little gathering, 
colored images of saints, the pictorial explanations of 
the sacrament, scenes in the life of Holy Church. 

But perhaps even more useful was the Mechanical 
Alphabet Instructor. You see the children were 
clever at remembering their words and their letters, 
not at all by form or sense, but by their position 
upon the page. That, the priest would remedy by 
an invention. He had constructed a wooden case 
and inserted four discs around the rim of which 


Priest-House and Palace 255 


appeared the letters of the alphabet: Four circular 
holes in the front of the case corresponding to the 
position of the letters. By a system of levers any one 
or more of the discs might be revolved a letter at a 
time. 

Was it not ingenious? The priest was proud. And 
did we not see how the device served to display 
every possible combination of letters? 

Of course to a brain thus busy about invention the 
details of living became as the vague buzz of some 
persistent insect. | 


Sundays were different. They interrupted inven- 
tions even if they did fail to give rest to the talkative. 

There were masses to be said on Sundays and on 
Sundays the veranda schoolroom was converted into 
a clinic. Those who came to mass often remained 
for medical care. A doctor would come out from the 
Cape; sometimes an American, sometimes a Haitian, 
both representing the Government Department of 
Sanitation. 

Sheets were hung across the end of the veranda; 
and on one side the patients waited, sitting in rows 
on the school benches; while the other side of the 
sheets became operating room and dispensary. 

Radiating from the Cape as a center, seventeen 
such weekly clinics are held in isolated districts 
which never before had any better care than could 


256 Black Haiti 


be given by some herb doctor—some Doctor Fewilles 
—who added to his simple knowledge of herbs the 
practice of all manner of charms; of beads and teeth 
and feathers, of smooth polished stones, preferably 
the hatchet-heads of the aborigines. A bit of the 
skin of a serpent wrapped in cloth and hung about the 
neck had miraculous power; or a sick man might be 
cured by a bath of leaves, over which had been 
said certain magic words; after which if the water 
were thrown into the street or upon the highway, who- 
ever in passing stepped upon it would carry off the 
disease in his own person, and thus the original 
sufferer would be freed. On the other hand, the 
leaves of a vine worn in the sandal next the sole of 
the foot were protection against the contracting 
of ills in this manner. A young mocking bird, dried 
and reduced to powder, was an infallible love potion. 
The fruit of a certain poisonous plant burned in the 
neighborhood would induce catalepsy in anyone 
against whom you had a grudge. So there were 
charms to produce as well as to counteract illness: 
to all of which was added the burning of candles to 
the Virgin and to popular saints. ; 

But now the sick of Haiti sit in hopeful rows 
waiting their turn at Science. Many still wear their 
Voodoo charms, and many will go from the clinic to 
the Doctor Feuilles; for the Haitian peasant is eager 
always to be on the safe side, in medicine as well as 


Priest-House and Palace 257 


in religion. And the men of science are tolerant in 
the matter of harmless charms, as Voodoo doctors 
learn to be tolerant of Science. 


On certain Sabbaths in the month the priest of 
Milot must mount a horse, and ride away to some 
more distant chapel; it is a ‘‘fixed date’? when 
crowds come fromfar. In his absence the turbaned 
cook of many words receives the clinic doctor. 
She flourishes the syringe which is to inject the 
life-saving salvarsan, and delights at the respect 
paid her by the waiting patients. It is wonderful 
to her to conduct the ménage of a priest and on 
Sundays to act as surgical assistant, presiding over 
syringes and cotton and rows of important bottles. 

On the benches are little rickety bodies, wasted 
bodies whose abdomens are distended. There are 
the ominous swellings of yaws and the far advanced 
cases of syphilis. Other diseases may from time to 
time come, but always there are these chronic devas- 
tors of Haiti; always hookworm and syphilis and 
malaria. 

“But,” omnipotently reassures the woman of 
much talk, as she sets forth oil of chenopodium, 
saline purgatives, quinine and salvarsan, ‘‘but for 
all, there is medicine.’”’ 


Thus in the priest-house at the gates of Sans 
Souci did life fluctuate from school to invention and 


258 Black Haiti 


mass to clinic; the days of the week and the weeks 
of the years slipping by like beads upon a rosary. 
And no one stopped to think of the palace, not really 
to think of it. Of course they were sometimes 
aware of its presence. There it was, as in the early 
morning you went along the path to the shower— 
whose water supply was so ingeniously contrived to 
spray the bather through perforations in the top of 
a discarded tin can. And there was the palace in 
the sun when you went out with the Mechanical 
Alphabet Instructor to test the progress of children 
murmuring their lessons under a tree. There was 
the palace when you climbed to the plain little 
chapel so meagerly provided with the usual tawdry 
allurements; the palace looking down upon the sick 
gathered for the clinic; and in the night the palace 
lovely and regal under the moon—always the palace. 
But no one in little Milot which lies at its gates as 
a temple is said to nestle in the paws of the Sphinx; 
no one in Milot wondered about the dream, crys- 
tallized in the palace ruins. 


MAJESTY 


J 


WHEN King Christophe lived in the palace of Sans 
Souci there were in his kingdom few with the skill 
to read or write, so that the King’s memory was 
perpetuated by talk: the great grandfathers and the 
great grandmothers talking to the children who 
were to become the grandfathers and the grand- 
mothers. They talked, for the old love always to see 
young eyes grow saucer-sized with wonder. 

‘‘Oh, you might be glad that you were but a 
baby in your mother’s arms, or you too would have 
had to help build the Citadel!” 

And when the old spoke of the Citadel they called 
it La Ferriére and their voices dropped as though even 
yet the King might hear. 

But suppose you ran away? To the hills Narra 

You could not run away from the King. There 
were the guns of La Ferriére to prevent. If you had 
got even so far as the Cape, the guns could still 
strike you down. And if such a runaway were taken 
alive, there were the cells of the Citadel: into which 

259 


260 Black Haiti 


aman might be lowered and there left to die—slowly, 
without food or water. And so narrow were the 
walls of those forgotten cells that a man might 
never find ease by the changing of his position, but 
must remain to the end upright. 

‘So you might be glad that you were a baby in 
the days of King Christophe!” 

Even his favorites were not safe. If you lived in 
the palace it might happen that the King waked in 
an ill humor. Was there not the story of Roumage? 

And what then? 

The King, waking in evil mood, sent for Roumage. 
‘“‘T have had a strange dream”’ said Christophe. “‘I 
dreamed, Roumage, that you had betrayed me.”’ 

‘“TSire . . . I, betray you! I should prefer to die!” 

‘‘And of that I am so much persuaded,”’ said the 
King, ‘‘that to save you from the fate of one who 
betrays his sovereign, I have just given orders for 
your execution.”’ 

And Roumage was delivered over at once to the 
soldiers. 

Then you never knew what would please Chris- 
tophe. There was the case of the peasant, driving his 
ox-cart along the road which leads from Sans Souci 
tothe Cape. It wasa flagged roadin those days... . 
flagged all the way. And when His Majesty and the 
Queen went to the Cape six greys drew their carriage. 
So it happened that on the day when the wooden 


Majesty 261 


wheels of the peasant’s cart rattled over the flags the 
King’s cortége approached at full gallop. 

The peasant shouted and applied well the whip. 
But the ox being very stupid, ignored the whip and 
the curses. Then, very much frightened, the man 
cried, ‘‘Here Pétion; into the ditch and out of the 
King’s way. Into the ditch with you!”’ 

‘“Why,” asked the King, ‘‘Why do you call that 
ox Pétion?”’ 

‘‘Sire, [ have given him the name of your Majesty’s 
enemy because, like him, he is lazy and stupid. 
When I strike the brute it seems to me that I strike 
at Pétion himself.” 

Now you would have thought—the old would pause 
at this point to explain to the young—you would have 
thought this a very clever device for winning the 
King’s favor; since but for Pétion, Christophe would 
have been King over all Haiti instead of over the 
north only. 

So you would have thought it a clever idea to call 
the ox Pétion. But with the King you never knew! 
For at once he exclaimed that Pétion was his colleague 
and that as such he must be respected. And the end 
of it was that the soldiers were ordered to put the 
rope about the neck of the peasant. An insolent 
fellow the King called him. 

With Christophe not even a Duke was safe. It 
was said that he beat with a stick the Duke of 


262 Black Haiti 


Marmelade, Governor of the Cape. It was nothing 
in his day to be flogged to death . . . for the 
barest suspicion. And there was the squad of 
soldiers ordered to march off the top of the Citadel; 
merely that he might give some visitor proof of his 
military discipline. He commanded, and they 
marched; that was the rule of the King. 

‘Therefore you might be glad that you had not in 
those days been born!” 


iA 


To the legends history adds certain facts. 

There is a little slave boy, Henri Christophe, 
born in the island of Granada and brought as a 
child to Haiti. After a gap of unrecorded years there 
suddenly appears a General Christophe who is one 
of the heroes of the Independence. Then there is 
Christophe elected President to follow Dessalines. 
But to be mere President after Dessalines had been 
Emperor was not to be thought of. Such an office 
gave a man no more power than a corporal. True, 
the emperor job had brought no luck to Dessalines. 
Thus Christophe reflects and decides to be King; 
coming from Granada he had a tradition of kings. A 
conflict results in Pétion as President of the south and 
Christophe as king of the north. 

But such facts build only a skeleton; they do not 
pulsate. 


Majesty 263 


And then a hundred years ago a man named 
Harvey came on a visit to Haiti. Harvey was a 
thoroughly respectable person, writing himself down 
as of Queen’s College, Cambridge. Nothing of the 
soldier-man about him; no roving eye for women 
like Marcus Rainsford, late Captain of the Third 
West India Regiment. Harvey was interested in 
education; he inspected schools, examined pupils, 
and drew conclusions. But fortunately Harvey also 
was curious; he had an eager open sort of mind: he 
made friends and he had the gift of making people 
talk. When he is summoned from the oblivion of 
a hundred years ago, he is a lively witness. 

Being a white, he’d not been permitted to pene- 
trate more than three miles into the interior; but 
how he’d used his eyes—and his friends! He knew 
all the foreigners at the Cape. Some of them had 
been living for years in Haiti. But they couldn’t 
tell him what he especially wanted to know. He was 
keen to know about the palace of Sans Souci— 
about the Court life and the King. So he made 
friends among Haitians, among Christophe’s officers 
and the members of his household. 

And as I have said, Harvey understood how to 
make people talk. 

Among those friends there was the Baron Dupuy. 
At the time of the Independence Dupuy had been a 
young subaltern in the Haitian army. He confided 


264 Black Haiti 


to Harvey that looking at his situation, he’d seen 
plainly that there was at that time nothing for him 
in Haiti. With so many ahead of him he couldn’t 
expect promotion. And anyway, he detested Des- 
salines. So he concluded to go to the States and 
make a fortune. With that airy nonchalance 
Haitian ex-slaves seem to have undertaken what- 
ever appealed to their fancy. Some would be 
Emperors and some would be Kings, and some 
would go to the States to make a fortune. Why not? 
If you’d freed yourself from slavery, why of course 
anything seemed possible. 

So Dupuy came and made his fortune; perhaps 
not so extensive as he would have Harvey think, but 
enough. Then there were rumors of the prosperity 
of Haiti under Christophe, and Dupuy decided to 
return. When Harvey knew him he was the Baron 
Dupuy; occupying a high place at Court and going 
constantly back and forth between the Cape and 
sans Souci. He was Harvey’s most valuable link 
with the mysterious palace, and he was such an 
agreeable companion; a great favorite with the 
British residents who often had him at their parties; 
altogether pleasant and courteous; an easy and 
spontaneous talker, ever ready to serve them. Mosi 
interesting fellow. 

Harvey, within his tantalizing three-mile limit, 
was observant; and of course Dupuy wanted to 


Majesty 265 


know what the Englishman thought of everything. 
The King too would be interested. When at the 
Cape the King himself was fond of talking to for- 
eigners, especially to the British. In that way he 
had happened to import to Haiti the Lancaster 
system of education. Some Englishman had praised 
it, and Christophe had at once announced that 
Haiti must have it; Haiti must have everything 
and do everything that was admirable. Teachers 
and books were sent for and Lancaster schools set up 
in the little towns of the black Kingdom. 

Christophe would be glad that Harvey had found 
the pupils quick and accurate for Christophe revered 
education, and mourned that he could do no more 
than sign his name. 

And what did Harvey think of the people—the 
Haitian people? Within his three miles he declared 
that they had impressed him as happy, industrious, 
temperate, loving liberty, and Haiti. Among the 
upper classes he had seen the same ease and elegance 
of manner, of which Rainsford had written nearly 
twenty years before: the same courtesy to all whites 
except the French. 

Dupuy was glad. And what... what did 
Harvey think of their King? 

And Harvey, who it must be remembered, was of 
Queen’s College, Cambridge, Harvey had said that 
when watching the King review the troops, it was 


266 Black Haiti 


impossible not to regard him as a ‘‘perfect General 
and a distinguished hero.’’ Harvey had said that 
the King spoke with such fluency and judgment, that 
his face was so intelligent and genial that one became 
almost at once unconscious of his race and his origin. 

Holding such tolerant opinions, of course Harvey 
won the confidence and friendship of his Haitian 
acquaintances. They were happy that Harvey was 
to go home and write it all down in a book. 

It was a pity that he might not see the palace. 

The palace was gay and beautiful in the sun. Its 
stucco, which was of the clear yellow of the mesquite 
flower, reflected the sunlight until one would have 
said that the palace was of gold. Its cornices were 
delicately carved. Water fell splashing into the 
basin of a fountain on its great staircase, and above 
the fountain there was a half-circle of very deep, 
very bright blue, with on either side panels of 
Pompeian red. The same warm rose-red banded the 
balustrade, while blue, to match the half-circle 
above the fountain, banded the wall, following the 
steps of the stairway. ‘There were set-in panels of 
blue between the windows and the columns stood 
out white, like marble, against the yellow stucco 
of the walls. And all the little sentry-boxes were 
bright yellow and white, with night and day a 
uniformed soldier in each. 

Approaching the palace, one would have said that 


gene 


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Ruins . .. only ruins . . . and yet of an 
indefinable majesty, as though they had once 
been the expression of some human dream, 


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Majesty 267 


it was of gold, jewelled in deep blue and rose-red. 
It was unfortunate that none of Harvey’s friends 
were able to secure for him the King’s permission 
to visit this Sans Souci. 

Within, its rooms were magnificent; floors of 
marble or polished mahogany, paintings and great 
glistening mirrors, hangings of tapestry and silk, 
costly furniture, china and silver. No King could 
have had better. 

On a day when the Court received the sight was 
indeed gorgeous. | 

It was compulsory that all nobility, all civilian and 
military officers should attend, and invariably in 
the uniform of their station. ‘They would pass 
through the gates and climb the grand staircase to 
the terrace where the Court waited. 

With the King and the Queen, the Prince Royal 
and the Princesses, there were the members of the 
Royal Household. The Grand Almoner in his 
robes, for he was also Archbishop of Haiti; the Grand 
Cup-bearer; the Grand Marshal of the Palace; the 
Marshal of His Majesty’s apartments; the ten 
Governors of Palaces; the ten Governors of Castles; 
the sixteen Chamberlains; the twelve Knights and 
the seven Grand Huntsmen; the seven Professors of 
the Arts and Sciences; the Grand Master of Cere- 
monies with his assistants; the physicians and 
apothecaries, the pages and the heralds. 


268 Black Haiti 


Even more numerous was the Military Household 
of this black King. Of the four Lieutenant-Generals 
three were Dukes, the Field-Marshals and Major- 
Generals had all the rank of Barons. And there 
were any quantity of mere Colonels, Lieutenant- 
Colonels and Captains. 

The Queen too had her Household; her Lady of 
Honor, her Lady of the Presence and her Ladies of 
the Palace. Even the Prince Royal and the Prin- 
cesses had retinues of their own. Always with the 
Prince was his tutor—the Baron de Vastey who was 
also one of the King’s Secretaries; an important 
person at Court, and writing books which the King 
had printed in his own Royal Printing Office. 


Dupuy was proud. All were immensely proud of 
their King, and of the magnificence of his Court. 
Nothing, not even in Europe, they were convinced 
could excel its splendor. Vastey, for example, knew 
Europe and he would not have allowed a Haitian 
King to fail in magnificence. The costumes of the 
ladies were imported from Paris, and what Officers 
ever wore more gold lace on their coats, or heavier 
epaulettes, and who in their caps had more flaunting 
plumes? While those who were members of the 
Royal and Military Order of St. Henry wore the 
insignia of a cross of gold enamelled in lapis lazuli, 
with on one side the image of St. Henry and the 


Majesty 269 


inscription ‘‘Henri Fondateur 1811,’’ and on the 
other side a crown of laurels with a star and the 
words ‘‘Prix de la valeur.” 

But of course Harvey had often seen this cross 
and noted that it was worn according to the rank 
of its owner; on a black ribbon placed from right 
to left if worn by a superior officer; on a red ribbon 
passed from left to right if worn by a commandant; 
hanging from a bit of Haitian colored ribbon— 
red and black—and fastened in the buttonhole, if 
a chevalier were the wearer. 

From this Harvey might judge how punctiliously 
everything was done at the Court; with what cere- 
monious etiquette every detail was conducted. They 
were all very proud that it was so. Dupuy would 
have loved to have his British friends see the grandeur 
of the spectacle as Dukes and Barons, Marshals, 
pages and heralds mounted the long staircase under 
the blue sky, with all white and gold in the sun 
palace, inset with panels of blue and panels of 
Pompeian red. 

And at the Cape, Harvey who was permitted only 
those inadequate three miles, questioned everyone. 
He suspected that in spite of their pride in the glories 
of the Court, many were secretly bored by the for- 
mality of which they boasted. All sorts of things 
which were perfectly natural to them they might 
not do, and endless were the unfamiliar restrictions 


270 Black Haiti 


which must not be violated. To men and women 
accustomed to dancing under the stars to barbaric 
beat of drums, the life must have been cramping, 
as a shoe is cramping to an untamed bare foot. The 
reality of the glittering slaves’ dream must often 
have been burdensome. But for certain alien evi- 
dence it might be open to doubt how far they really 
adhered to this regal ceremony. 

Harvey’s additional testimony is from two white 
women who lived for a time in the palace itself. 
Christophe had decided that the Royal Princesses 
must be educated. They must have governesses. 
Vastey, whose influence was great, had much to say 
about the importance of educating women. When 
the King decided, he acted, and so a hundred years 
ago, two Philadelphia ladies sailed for Haiti to take 
charge of instructing the Princesses, Athénaire and 
Améthyst. 

After fifteen sea-sick days the poor ladies had 
arrived at the Cape where they were received by 
the Baron de Vastey. 

Later they confessed that they had never been 
able entirely to shake off the desolation of that first 
impression. They saw a city just beginning to 
emerge from the ruins of fire and pillage. Even to 
the accustomed inhabitants the Cape was in those 
days a city of ghosts. Christophe was having it 
rebuilt as speedily as possible, but the Philadelphia 


Majesty 271 


ladies had never seen anything so desolate. For- 
tunately their minds might not even faintly picture 
the actual horrors from which the ghosts arose. 

Reading Harvey’s optimistic ‘‘but Christophe is 
having the city rebuilt,’ you feel in your knowledge 
of what is to be, as a clairvoyant might feel who 
sees doom written on the cards, but who is withheld 
from uttering a word of warning. For you know 
what was hidden from Harvey, and from the builders, 
and from the homesick ladies. You know that the 
bricks being laid upon bricks are in thirty years 
to be shaken into ruins; you know that thousands 
are to perish on the black night of a Saturday after- 
noon which is on its way. And you see the Cape as 
it is a hundred years after Harvey and the affable 
Dupuy and the black King: you see the coral vine 
and the bougainvillea festooning those ruins. And 
yet you are dumb as you read. There is infinite 
pathos in the ‘‘nowadays’’ of those old pages, 
and in the hope with which the then living move 
toward their veiled future which you know so well. 
You see them marching, and you may not cry out 
‘‘ Fattes attencion!”’ 

So Harvey wrote about rapid rebuilding, and 
about how dreary it all was to the newly arrived 
governesses, weak and ill as they were, with the 
hot streets doubtless undulating in the hateful 
movement of the sea. 


272 Black Haiti 


And there was the Baron de Vastey to meet them. 

They thought his face insidious and evil. And 
perhaps divining their opinion, the Baron enquired, 
‘“Well, Ladies, suppose the French were to come 
again, what would you do?’”’ They detected sarcasm 
in his voice and in his smile, as though he would 
remind them of their isolation and their helplessness. 
Philadelphia seemed far off across a dreadful ocean, 
and the coming of the French not impossible. In- 
deed the ceaseless nightmare of the Haitian was that 
one day he should wake to behold upon the horizon 
a fleet bigger and stronger than that which brought 
Leclerc and Rochambeau. And if the fleet came, 
there would be all over again the conflict. 

‘Well, Ladies, what would you do?” 

The ladies drew themselves up—that seems to 
have been always the first law of self-preservation 
for ladies, ‘‘Draw yourselves up, and the rest will 
take care of itself.’ It did, for with inimitable 
dignity those ladies, fifteen wretched days from 
Philadelphia, alone in the black Kingdom of Chris- 
tophe, replied, ‘‘We should place ourselves under the 
protection of your King, as we have now done.” 

That was how they considered an impudent 
mulatto Baron should be answered: for of course 
ladies could not know the bitterness which ate away 
the very heart of a mulatto Baron. 

Yet for all the impossibility of their understanding, 


Majesty eye 


what amazingly good sports they were to have gone 
in those days to Haiti as governesses to black 
Princesses! 

It was the friendly Baron Dupuy who drove with 
them, in a London-made coach behind four greys, 
out over the flagged road to Sans Souci; Dupuy who 
was gentlemanly and who asked them many amusing 
questions about what had happened in the States 
since he left. 

The country was charming, fertile valleys among 
hills; lovely palm trees in the strange shapes of the 
wind; banana leaves drooping and drooping like 
graceful ladies; and little picturesque thatched 
villages. Then all at once there was the Palace! 
Shining at the far end of the valley! It was a 
moment of triumph for Dupuy when the two white 
ladies first beheld his King’s palace,—the slaves’ 
dream done in brick and stone and color. 


The ladies told afterward how they had been 
received by a stout nice-looking mulatto woman who 
was wife to the King’s nephew. She had shown them 
into a great salon filled with people. Everyone had 
stared; some, they said, had never before seen a 
white woman. ‘“‘Look!’”’ one had exclaimed, ‘‘how 
beautiful she is!’’ 

At eleven o’clock, after coffee and a rest, the 
ladies were taken to the library where there waited 


274 Black Haiti 


the Duke de Limonade, Minister of Foreign Affairs; 
a courtly man who had been educated in Paris. 
Harvey could have told them of the strict integrity 
of this Duke, he could have explained that the title 
of Limonade, like that of Marmelade, was not an 
opera bouffe absurdity of negro slaves, but that they 
had merely continued the names given by the French 
to certain Departments. Harvey could have explained 
much to the new governesses, but they were now 
to form their own unaided judgments of the Court. 

When they had been talking for some moments 
with the Duke of Limonade the door opened and 
there entered six young negro pages, followed by 
the King and various nobles of the palace. The 
ladies said that they thereupon rose at once and 
made profound salutations, refusing the King’s 
invitation to be seated. 

From the library they were shown into what they 
described as a most spacious drawing room, furnished 
with taste and extravagance. Large folding doors 
opened to admit the Queen, the Prince Royal and 
the Princesses; allin the most elegant costumes. The 
Queen was extremely kind and friendly, asking 
about their passage and their health, hoping that 
they would be happy, and assuring them that she 
stood always ready to assist them. There would 
be a carriage at their disposal. And now they were to 
have luncheon with the nobles. 


Majesty 275 


But the ladies were not happy. Everyone was 
unfailingly courteous and attentive. The Queen 
became affectionate and sometimes even dined with 
them herself. The food and the wines were delicious, 
for the King was an epicure. But the ladies were 
lonely. They found the ceremony of the Court to 
be as inflexible as others had described it. The 
restraint was unendurable. 

For some months they remained, instructing the 
young Princesses in English, French, drawing and 
composition. The dungeons, the executions, the 
flogging and the Royal concubines of rumor seem 
not to have been remarked by the ladies. Perhaps 
they saw nothing of such things, or they were sub- 
jects one did not discuss. 

For their departure the two white governesses 
gave as their reasons only loneliness and the rigid 
life of the Court. They left, they said, ‘‘with feelings 
of lasting interest.” 


it 


Like brilliant hued automatons, known by this 
or that grandiose title, the nobles ascend the palace 
stairs and pass in and out of the rooms. Clothing is 
extravagant and showy, wines delicious, furnishings 
costly. The Queen is kind and loves the secluded 
gardens back of the palace. The Queen has ex- 


276 Black Haiti 


pressive eyes and is of a pleasing benevolence. The 
Princess Athénaire is listless, while Améthyst is 
eager. Both are models of filial piety. The King is 
tall and well-proportioned; he is quick, energetic, 
eats fast and sleeps little. When alone with his 
Household he is fond of recounting tales of his 
adventurous life, of his prowess, of his miraculous 
escapes, and of the men he has known—Toussaint 
and Leclerc, the terrible Rochambeau, the vengeful 
Dessalines, and that French noble under whom he 
had sailed to Savannah, to the aid of American 
revolutionists. And the King was a brilliant racon- 
teur; scenes came to life when he described them. 

All this used to be enough in the days when we 
were satisfied with stirring deeds. Now we must 
know what forces and emotions move men; we are 
absorbed less in what they have done than in why. 
What filled the King’s mind? What were the 
emotions which produced the palace; what was the 
dream behind the materialization? But Christophe 
is baffling—indeed as Nemours has said, one of the 
most curious characters of history. The written 
documents which bear his signature are few and of 
an official nature. There is nothing intimately re- 
vealing in such dictated papers, to which is appended 
the name of a King who could write nothing more 
than hisname. Were it not for the Baron de Vastey 
we should have to be content with incredible legends, 


Majesty 277 


and with our own interpretation of scanty facts, 
while the inner thoughts of the King would remain 
mysterious. 

But always there is the Baron waiting to tell us 
of what he and the King talked on the terrace, 
sitting perhaps under that star-apple tree which has 
become legendary as Christophe’s tree of justice 
where he pronounced summary decisions which 
knew no appeal and which were executed within 
the hour. | 

The Baron waits in the books which he wrote in 
the palace; books which were printed in the King’s 
own presses at the Cape and at Sans Souci. Had 
they been concerned with the life of Christophe 
they would probably have been worthless, except 
in so far as they showed what sort of man he had 
commanded the author to portray. But in those 
books which Vastey wrote under the eye of the 
King, the passages of flattery scattered here and 
there in the pages are perfunctory; as though they 
had been almost automatically inserted by a courtier 
whose entire being was absorbed by quite another 
theme. And, listening to the reading of chapter 
after chapter, as each volume was composed under 
his egis, the King must have been absorbed by the 
same theme; so much absorbed as not to observe 
how incidental were the fulsome allusions to himself. 

And the theme is Race. 


278 Black Haiti 


Vastey wrote in passionate justification of the 
negro. He drew a picture of the ghastly evils of the 
Colonial system, and dedicated his book to Chris- 
tophe, as the one man of color who could lift his 
voice to plead before the sovereigns of Europe the 
cause of an oppressed people. He wrote a book of 
Political Reflections, intended as a reply to the 
detractors of Haiti, and this he dedicated to his 
pupil the Prince Royal; in the hope, he says, that 
the Prince would always nourish in Haitian hearts 
the sacred fire of liberty and of eternal hatred of the 
French. Vastey was shaken by stormy indignation 
at the ridicule that France, sore at the loss of Haiti, 
was heaping upon Christophe’s monarchy: so 
shaken that he confesses that he can with difficulty 
restrain himself from destroying the scornful articles, 
instead of answering them. 

And Vastey wrote with the authority of one whom 
the King had made Chancellor, Member of the 
Privy Council, Knight of the Royal and Military 
Order of St. Henry, and tutor to His Highness, 
Prince Victor Henry. It is obvious that Vastey 
must have written what the King believed, and 
that the King trusted and looked up to Vastey. 
Vastey was his voice to posterity, as he was his 
medium of communication with that world of letters 
for which the King had so great respect, and which 
he might never enter without some such medium. 


Majesty 279 


For Vastey could repeat to him the sayings of 
wise men. Vastey was familiar with Montesquieu, 
with Voltaire and Virgil, Pope and Buffon and 
Grégoire. Vastey could relate to him what the 
English explorer, Mungo Park had written of 
Africa. The Africans were not, Vastey told him, so 
savage as the French would have their Haitian 
descendants believe. Many had the education of 
Mohammedan civilization. Mungo Park had, for 
instance, met negro lawyers in Africa as clever at 
everything, including chicanery, as any in Europe. 
And there was in Africa hospitality and kindness. 
Vastey was fond of the story of the negro woman 
who, finding Mungo Park hungry and exhausted, had 
taken him to her hut, had broiled fish for his supper, 
and made it possible for him to pass the night in 
safety under her protection. Vastey loved and 
repeated Mungo Park’s description of that night 
when as. he lay upon the mat spread for him, he 
listened to the improvised song of the women who 
sang over their spinning. Mungo Park was himself 
the subject of their song whose air was sweetly 
plaintive. ‘‘The winds,’ they sang, ‘‘roar, and the 
rains fall. The poor white man, faint and weary, 
came and sat under our tree. He has no mother to 
bring him milk; no wife to grind his corn. Let us 
pity the white man; no mother has he to bring him 


bP] 


milk; no wife... 


280 Black Haiti 


And so, Vastey argued, there had been kindness 
and hospitality in old Africa, even though it had 
been indirectly at the hands of natives that Mungo 
Park lost his life. But such tragedies might happen 
anywhere; a race should not be held responsible. 
And had their enemies forgotten that the Greeks 
were living in gross ignorance when they were 
civilized by colonies of Egyptians? And that the 
light which the Greeks had from Africa was spread 
to the Romans and through them to the barbarous 
Gauls? 

These arguments in the old book printed in 1817 
at the Royal Press of the palace of Sans Souci in the 
Kingdom of Haiti, read strangely like the reason- 
ing of George A. Dorsey, Ph.D., LL.D.; formerly 
Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University 
of Chicago, and Curator of Anthropology of the Field 
Museum of Natural History. 

How eagerly would Vastey have welcomed and 
repeated to his King what the white scientist of the 
year 1925 has to say of the life cycle and the human 
race! 

“There is,’’ he writes, ‘‘no known fact of human 
anatomy or physiology which implies that capacity 
for culture or civilization or intelligence inheres 
in this race or that type.” 

So Vastey triumphs; with Dr. Dorsey corroborat- 
ing what he wrote long ago for his King to print. 


The gateway of the palace. 





ae Pee 
DS ett + Ts. 
¥ i ay : 





Majesty 281 


‘Once,’ continues this scientist of to-day, ‘‘there 
was no Anglo-Saxon; but there was civilization. 
Were there ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ races then? How 
‘low’ the savage European must have seemed to the 
Nile Valley African, looking north from his pyramid 
of Cheops!”’ 

Thus Dr. Dorsey sounds like an echo of that Baron 
who wrote in the now ruined palace; while on the top 
of Le Bonnet 4 L’Evéque Christophe’s Citadel was 
saying, brick by brick, what Vastey, word by word, 
was setting forth on paper. 

Once only in the pages does the white blood in 
Vastey speak; once when he betrays that the white 
is his standard of physical beauty. In all else this 
mulatto Baron is the passionate advocate of the 
negro. ‘‘Having received the light of day from a 
negress”’ he proudly declares that he identifies him- 
self with Africans. 

And then quivering with rage he would read to 
the King the ridicule of Haiti which was appearing 
in the French periodicals of the day, in reply to 
which he cries: 

‘Bonaparte is on his rock in St. Helena, and the 
French have their Bourbons. But little do we care 
about their dynasty. They should care as little 
about the dynasty we have chosen to govern us! 

“But a black king in Haiti . . . the crown on 
the head of a black! Vozld, that is what these French 


282 Black Haiti 


journalists cannot endure . . . As though royalty 
were the exclusive right of the white color. Are 
force, courage and virtue then matters of epidermis? 

‘“They say that we should be exterminated. ‘To 


exterminate anentire people . . . GreatGod! Be- 
cause they do not wish to resume the chains of 
slavery! 


‘Think Sire, this man Mazéres compares us to 
donkeys and horses. Jmbecile! He might begin by 
establishing the superiority of the white horse to the 
black, of the white dog 

“But black as we are, and yellow in complexion, 
bowed as we have been for centuries under the yoke 
of slavery, reduced to the condition of the beasts, 
how resolutely ought we not to exert ourselves, how 
much of wisdom and virtue is necessary for the 





reanimation of our race!”’ 

Even the priests, he accuses bitterly, had been 
employed to keep them in a state of subjection; to 
prevent them from striking off their chains, by urging 
that it was necessary to endure pain in this world in 
order to be blessed in the next. 

“‘Great God! the tears! the misery! the 
blood Ae aaa 


But Vastey was to refute allthis. The King would 
speak through Vastey. They would urge that in 
judging the civilization of Haiti one should remember 


Majesty 283 


always the profound ignorance, the abject state from 
which they had risen: risen of their own effort. 

And then together Vastey and the King would 
talk of the dream; of the country already prospering, 
of the schools and the army, of the rich possibilities 
of the soil, of the manufactures—Christophe would 
have Haiti produce everything. Whatever another 
country did, that also Haiti was to accomplish. And 
if as they talked, they walked upon the terrace, the 
palace would rise before them, an incarnation of the 
slave’s dream of majesty. Sans Souci was their 
answer to the world. 

In each sentry-box a soldier; water splashing cool 
into the fountain ... 

Never for a moment, they would agree, must the 
ceremony of the Court be relaxed. Those Frenchmen 
should see whether or not black men were donkeys. 
They should see that the monarchy of Haiti was a 
stable government, with a constitution and laws. 

“Grand Dieu!” exclaims Vastey. ‘‘What we 
have achieved in a quarter of a century! Look where 
you will in the world and you will see no such prodigy! 

“Oh, Haiti! Oh, my country!’ His cry is likea 
sob. ‘“‘Nowhere else can a black man lift up his 
head !”’ 


And between my eyes and the page there walks 
the memory of a little mulatto man trembling with 


284 Black Haiti 


indignation and protesting that a child shall not be 
pictured on a post-card and labelled a monkey. 


The Vastey of the old books thus shows what lay 
behind the smile which the Philadelphia ladies had 
found evil when he had questioned, ‘‘And if the 
French should come, Ladies? What would you do?”’ 

In those books which he wrote for the King, he 
has poured out the heart of a mulatto Baron of a 
hundred years ago; he who had had, as he said, “‘no 
other masters than books, no other stimulation than 
hatred of tyrants.”” And the fire of his emotion 
must have kindled also the King. 

But the very glory of their dreams brought with 
it fear. Apprehension stole into the brave pages. 
The magnificence of the palace, the ease of life, the 
honor of bearing titles—all this but served to increase 
the fear. There was now so much to lose. 

So Vastey’s ‘‘What would you do if the French 
should come?’’ became, ‘‘ What shall we do?”’ 

Unremittingly work must go forward on the 
Citadel, their impregnable fortress. But had not 
Dessalines believed that even the fortresses were not 
sufficient? Had he not held that all the coast towns 
should be abandoned and that the entire popula- 
tion should move into the interior hills, and there 
build new cities? What if Dessalines had been 
right? 


Majesty 285 


So for Vastey and the King the splendor of the 
dream was often lost in the fear. 


IV 


Harvey was gone back to England; the Phila- 
delphia ladies had sailed away; the books which 
Vastey had written at the Palace had been printed. 
So that at the end of the story there is left only a 
composite of legend and history. 

It was August and it was 1820 when the King went 
to mass in the old church at Limonade. And of what 
happened there legend has it that, kneeling on his 
prie-dieu Christophe saw, standing before the altar 
and officiating at the mass, the ghost of the priest, 
Corneille Brelle, who had some days before been 
executed at the Royal command. Seeing the ghost, 
says legend, the King’s head fell heavily forward 
upon the prie-dieu and blood flowed from his fore- 
head. And the peasant wireless relayed the news— 
by drum and by conch-shell, from valley to valley 
and mountain to mountain. 

The ghost is legend but the King stricken by 
paralysis as he kneeled at mass is history. A thing 
had happened upon which Vastey and the King had 
failed to calculate. The old fear of the French had 
gradually grown less acute. Christophe had begun to 
put on fat; he was drinking more—drinking of rum 


286 Black Haiti 


and of that insidiously intoxicating beverage which 
is called power. And those are drinks which should 
never be mixed. They were disastrously heady stuff 
for a man whose early years had been passed under 
the restraint of slavery and whose later life had been 
held in check by stern military necessity. As Chris- 
tophe drank of them more and more deeply, the 
outline of his dream became less clear: and his dis- 
cipline became tyrannical; he yielded to those fits of 
passion which were the seeds of the legends which 
now celebrate his cruelty. The numbers of his 
enemies increased. Such men as Richard, Duke of 
Marmelade, did not relish being beaten with a stick, 
and Christophe had forgotten the serpent of color 
prejudice, lost sight of the fact that Haiti which 
cries out against color discriminations has always 
nourished its own private representative of the 
species. For never had there been any real unity of 
black and mulatto. Only in the face of French 
persecution and French menace had they temporarily 
consolidated. The blacks had always realized that 
in their fusing would lie Haiti’s strength. Dessalines’ 
constitution had declared that all citizens of Haiti 
were to be known as blacks, whatever the shade of 
their color; and he had been anxious to set the 
example of amalgamation by marrying his black 
daughter to the mulatto general, Pétion. But this 
doctrine had never been accepted by the man of 


Majesty 287 


color, and throughout history the antagonism be- 
tween black and half-breed was continually to raise 
its ugly head. 

In the reign of Christophe those rabid mulattoes 
who did not fancy equality with the pure blooded 
negro made the most of the King’s faults. But 
until that day in the church at Limonade, Christophe 
had scorned his enemies. Then he realized that, 
unless he could preserve at least a semblance of 
strength, the game was up for him. He had himself 
rubbed with rum and red pepper in an effort to 
restore life to dead limbs. He improved sufficiently 
to be taken to Sans Souci: but he must be able to 
mount; if he could but appear once more on horseback 
before his army! There is a tradition that he made 
one final supreme effort; that his foot found the 
stirrup, his hands the reins, that summoning all his 
force he attempted to throw himself into the saddle. 
But his strength was inadequate. He fell—he, the 
King, fell prone upon his face in the presence of his 
army. The game was up. It is said that he then 
had himself placed on his throne under the star- 
apple tree where he had so often settled the 
fate of men. Seated there he had called up his 
old air of majesty. ‘‘Let the troops file before 
me’’; he had commanded. And the men had 
passed, swearing as they passed, fidelity to the death 


288 Black Haiti 


Christophe had had nearly two months in which 
to think. From August to October thoughts had 
marched in procession through his brain. The death 
in his limbs had cruelly failed to numb his brain. 
He could sit on the terrace of Sans Souci looking 
upon the palace which had incarnated his dream, 
and he could think. Indeed it was impossible to 
rest from thinking. He saw with what imperceptible 
cunning the lines of his Fate had drawn closer, little 
by little closer, until they had chained him to his 
chair on the terrace. 

The punctilious Court ceremonial must slowly 
have relaxed, now that the King could no longer 
move through the réle; now that something other 
than majesty was filling his soul. For a new fear 
had come to the King, beside which the slaves’ fear 
of the French return was no more than a nightmare, 
dispelled by waking to find the bay peacefully 
empty in the morning sun. While the new fear 
which haunted Christophe was but the more vivid, 
the more credible in the waking hours. It could not 
be reasoned away and constantly fresh evidence of 
its reality was accumulating. The lines were tighter 
about the chair on the terrace, until the King knew 
beyond doubt or hope what it was that he must do, 
while there was yet time, before . . . before his 
hands too were caught in that lifeless grip where 
they refused to obey the commands of the brain. 


Majesty 289 


He who had despised the weakness of Napoleon in 
his captivity, he—Christophe—would die a King. 
But what if he waited too long? What if his hands 
were to refuse? Still the sun was sweet and a wife 
and daughters, whom he had made Royal, hovered 
about his chair. And there were even nobles who 
remained true and devoted. There was Dupuy and 
Belair . . . both good fellows. Others too... 
but so close now were the lines of Fate that the good 
fellows could not save him. 

Early in October his town of Saint Marc went 
over to the Republic of the south, and four days 
later, Richard, Governor of the Cape, he whom the 
King was said to have beaten with a stick, he also 
deserted. 


His own troops—his Royal Dahomey’s—had gone 
to the defense, but scarcely had they gone when 
heralds were heard crying the news that, with shouts 
of ‘‘Long live Liberty!’’ his picked troops had 
joined the insurrection. All along, in the intermin- 
able weeks of August and of September he had 
known that the game was up. Now the time was 
a matter, not of hours, but of moments, if he was 
to be King to the end. 

The Citadel? He had of course often in the past 
weeks thought of the Citadel: but even could they 
drag him alive to its height, what then? If his 


290 Black Haiti 


Royal Dahomeys had deserted who was there to 
defend the Citadel? And after all at any moment 
the thing which held his legs in its remorseless grip 
might grasp also his hands, or cloud the clear su- 
premacy of his will. 

A Haitian historian says that the King summoned 
to his chamber the Queen and the Prince Royal and 
the Princesses; that he tenderly caressed them, and 
that dismissing them he had himself bathed and 
dressed in white . . . all this though there re- 
mained to him only minutes. The King then 
announced that he would be alone. 

Alone he pulled the trigger. And all in the palace 
understood. All knew that Christophe had died a 
King. 


V 


A Colonel on duty in the palace at the time said 
that a servant with his eye to the key-hole of the 
King’s chamber saw Christophe pull that fateful 
trigger. And there is a legend that the bullets which 
the King carried in his revolver were of silver. 


FEAR 
I 


WHEN we mounted our horses at the priest’s door, 
the children were already assembled and the mo- 
notonous chirping of education had begun. 

We rode past Sans Souci through whose gaping 
roof unobstructed sunlight poured into the long 
abandoned rooms. ‘The trail began at once to climb; 
plunging up a narrow mountain path, so shadowed by 
mango and mahogany that the palace was immedi- 
ately lost. 

Up this trail to the Citadel they had brought the 
King Christophe upon the night when the shot had 
rung through the palace. They had put him in a 
hammock. There had been no time for anything 
else. Then those who were to the last devoted had 
swung the heavy load between their shoulders, and 
started the climb to the Citadel. 

For the King’s body must not fall into the desecrat- 
ing hands of insurrectionists. Memory of the fate 
of Dessalines was only fifteen years old, and the 
King’s friends would not risk a moment’s delay. 

291 


292 Black Haiti 


The fortress to which they climbed, crowns the 
peak of Le Bonnet a l’Evéque, and its way is so 
steep that the mourners must have been too breath- 
less to wail. Haste was a greater service to the 
King than any customary wailing. 

On foot they struggled up the precipitous 
mountain-side, stumbling under the awkward weight 
of the hammock. And on foot there followed the 
Queen, the Prince Royal and the young Princesses. 
With them was Baron Dupuy—the gracious Dupuy 
whom Harvey had always found so agreeable a 
companion. 

Undoubtedly on that forced pilgrimage to the 
Citadel, Dupuy had kept up a fiction of royalty. Yet 
each must have known that the shot had ended all; 
and that they were not royalty and nobility doing 
honor to a sovereign; but that a widow, a sou, 
daughters and a friend followed the dead body of a 
man whom they had loved—loved the strength and 
the vision of him, in spite of the increasing violence 
of his temper. 

So it was simply Maria Luisa, Victor Henry, 
Athénaire, Améthyst, and the merchant Dupuy who 
toiled up the trail. 


Thinking upon Christophe’s last journey, it was 
some time before I noticed that an extra man was 
attached to our little retinue. Martel, our general 





The great prow of the Citadel, 





Fear 293 


factotum, bestrode a lean, unhappy horse. Madame, 
the cook, had gone ahead accompanying the donkey 
whose patient back transported saucepans and 
provender. Three horse-boys attended the unwilling 
animals which conveyed us, the paraphernalia of 
photography, and the so-called essentials of civilized 
beings. 

And now among our company I saw a barefoot 
negro in the usual blue cotton. He introduced him- 
self as our guide, by name Christophe and, he added, 
a relative of the King. In him we had the one and 
only guide to the Citadel. 

He has no idea that some day the Citadel may 
Swarm with tourists, visiting the greatest monument 
to negro genius in the Western Hemisphere. He does 
not comprehend that history has no character more 
spectacular than the King Christophe. He knows 
only that for some reason these peculiar whites are 
interested to climb to the fortress and that money is 
to be had by annexing himself in the réle of guide. 
And since Christophe seems so important, what more 
sensible than to bear the name and to claim relation- 
ship! 

It was this guide who halted us at the point where 
the trail up from Grande Riviére joins the trail from 
Milot; the two merging there to form one zig-zag to 
the summit. And this is the first spot from which 
you may see the Citadel at close range. It has pre- 


294 Black Haiti 


viously been visible only in the haze of distance— 
from the ship’s deck in the harbor, or along the 
roads out of the Cape. At Milot you find that there 
are intercepting hills, so that not until the moment 
when the guide halts you where the trails intersect, 
do you begin to appreciate the magnitude of the 
thing. 

This spot from which you gaze up amazed to the 
mountain fortress, forms a natural breathing place 
for men and animals. It must always have been 
logical to pause here where the peak first appears to 
the climber. The King would certainly have halted 
that his appraising eye might estimate the progress 
of his workmen. 

And progress would never have gone forward with 
sufficient speed to satisfy his anxiety for its com- 
pletion. Its completion had become an obsession. 
At all costs work must be rushed on the impregnable 
fortress of La Ferriére. He grew indifferent to the 
human price. Legend has set the toll of lives at 
twenty thousand; but in the legends the voice is 
loud of those who did not dare speak while the King 
lived. 

Among the tales always precipitated if you so much 
as mention Haiti to one of its foreign residents is the 
story of the workmen who protested that they were 
unable to move a certain cannon. ‘‘Very well!” 
the King had shouted, for day after day he himself 


Fear 205 


supervised the construction of La Ferriére. ‘‘Very 
well’’; and at his orders one in every ten of the com- 
plaining workmen were shot; until the remainder 
found themselves able to put forth the necessary 
effort. 

Now if anyone should ask whether you know the 
tale, you may head them off. And you may add that 
it is hardly probable that a King whose constant 
anxiety was the increase of his war-devastated popu- 
lation, would so recklessly waste useful adult lives. 
Still the thing which the exaggerated myth symbo- 
lizes was undoubtedly true. Christophe was merci- 
less in the matter of the Citadel. No one was 
spared; even the women and children trundled sand 
and carried stone. But if he was inexorable the 
King reasoned that it was entirely for the good of 
his people. The Citadel was to be the last refuge 
when the French should come. It was to be stocked 
with food, supplied with water, fortified. The 
Citadel was the embodiment in stone and mortar 
and brick of the slaves’ fear of re-enslavement. 

The very difficulty of conveying to a mountain-top 
such quantities of building materials, such numbers 
of heavy cannon, so much ammunition, was stimu- 
lating to a vitality like that of Christophe. All his 
life he had been achieving the impossible—achieving 
freedom, independence, majesty. ‘To him the very 
enormity ot the undertaking contributed zest. While 


296 Black Haiti 


those talks with Vastey—the jibes which the Baron 
read aloud from French papers, the threats, and 
above all the contemplation of Sans Souci, fed the 
fear. For fear is most terrible when one has at last 
something to lose. 

So Christophe relentlessly goaded the thousands 
whose labor was shaping into an enduring monument 
this slave’s fear. 


And at the half-way breathing place the King 
would have paused to inspect his fortress. There also 
must the bearers of the heavy hammock have shifted 
their burden while they took breath for the steep 
ascent before them. 

The way to the top is now shadeless and narrow. 
There are places where the stones are so slippery 
that it is safer to dismount. And here the burden 
in the hammock must have been most difficult to 
manage. On this last stretch the trail twists up so 
under the shadow of the fortress that it is not until 
the final turn that you get its full effect. 

Then you view it in silent wonder. After your 
first gasp there may be inadequate cries of 

But—I had no idea, not the least idea of its size! 

Nor of its beauty! 

Nor its grandeur! 





No conception of the view! 
No realization of the loneliness! 


Fear — 297 


These things you may later exclaim, but at first 
you will be as silent as the Citadel itself. You will 
be dumb before its beauty and its size and its 
isolation. 

For there is beauty in all its lines; in the great 
prow, in the swell of the masonry where it joins the 
mountain-top, in its adaptation to the size and the 
shape of the summit, seeming as it does to be an 
extension of the peak itself. There is beauty in 
every detail of its construction. This is no clumsy 
pile of brick and stone, raised by crude hands; but a 
marvel of masterly workmanship, of brick fitted 
with nicety against brick, a marvel of true and 
gracious and aesthetically satisfying lines. How 
did slave hands build like this? Taking their fear 
and making of it beauty; raising a monument to 
their own genius, as in the Southern States they 
took their pain, and of it made the undying beauty 
of the negro spirituals. 


When a hundred years ago the men bearing the 
hammock arrived at the Citadel they found it 
occupied. Christophe had soldiers there. Some- 
times he had prisoners in the dungeons, and work 
was still going forward; while cannon and balls and 
barrels of powder were being hauled up the mountain. 

Of course in the Haitian fashion news of the shot 
had preceded that strange funeral cortége; so that the 


298 Black Haiti 


great iron-studded doors stood open to receive the 
King, while awed uncomprehending men had assem- 
bled to stare at the hammock. Bewildered, they 
would have looked on while the King was lowered 
uncoffined in a great vat of quick lime which 
happened to have been prepared for use by the 
workmen. There was no time for anything better 
befitting a King. 

What was then to be done? The King lay in his 
bed of lime. Down at the Cape and at Milot insur- 
gents plundered the palaces. The truth of what had 
happened became every moment clearer to the men 
stationed at the Citadel. They were free. No one 
now had authority to command their lives or their 
labor. Discipline had been stern under Christophe. 

Work should commence at daylight; from eight 
to nine they might breakfast; work should be re- 
sumed until noon; for two hours then there was 
rest, but from two o’clock until the fall of night they 
must again labor. ‘True, they were entitled to a 
fourth part of what the land produced. ‘True, they 
had never known such prosperity. But the keeping 
of hours was irksome, and there was the forced and 
unpaid toil on the Citadel. Now the King. . . 
the King was in that bed of lime. And down on the 
plain there was loot. Men could not be expected to 
remain at the lonely fortress; haunted as they were 
sure it would be. 


Fear 299 


90, at intervals up the mountain-side, on the way 
to the Citadel there still lie cannon and heaps of 
balls; left just where they were when the workers 
realized the meaning of the shot which had been 
fired at Sans Souci. 

And the family of Christophe, after much debate, 
much weighing of arguments, decided to return to 
the Cape and to put themselves under the protection 
of the revolutionist leaders. For all but the poor 
fat young Prince, it was'‘a wise decision. He, as the 
luckless Heir Apparent, was imprisoned and offi- 
cially or clandestinely executed. 

The monarchy was merged in the Republic, with 
a President who negotiated a costly understanding 
with France. Thus the fear of enslavement passed, 
and thus the Citadel came to be deserted. 


II 


Six years later Charles Mackenzie listened to the 
talk of the Cape, and in an old book now long out of 
print, he has chronicled what he heard. And Mac- 
kenzie, being British Consul-General to Haiti gos- 
sips, as it were, ex-cathedra. 

He saw walking about the Cape a big, bare-foot, 
bearded negro with a brutal face. The man had 
been Christophe’s executioner, fallen to the calling of 
porter. Grewsome gossip described the executioner’s 
custom of exacting fees from the relatives of the 


300 Black Haiti 


condemned, to whom he guaranteed painlessness in 
proportion to the amount of the bribe. But if that 
was his custom, and if executions were half so nu- 
merous as legend pretends, then logically the execu- 
tioner-in-chief would never have been reduced to the 
trade of porter. 

And Mackenzie saw also the woman whose hus- 
band Christophe had put in a mad-house, that he 
might take to himself the lady; a gentle, graceful and 
charming woman, Mackenzie thought her. But she 
soon wearied the King who then sent her to rescue 
her husband. All this being the gossip of a hundred 
years ago—and just six years after the shot in the 
palace. 

The Cape in those days was a sad place; quite un- 
like the gay city Rainsford had found it under the 
rule of Toussaint. There were few entertainments; 
only the peasants danced as ever to the drums. A 
young mulatto named Papillon, who had been 
educated under Christophe’s imported teachers, was 
conducting a school, but the King’s elaborate agri- 
cultural system had collapsed. The re-building of 
the town had however been completed, and Mac- 
kenzie comments upon well-paved streets, stone 
houses and handsome squares where water played 
in fountains. 

With all the time an earthquake scheduled to 
come off twenty years later! 


Fear 301 


But that fate being still veiled, the sadness of the 
town lay in its contemplation of what had been, 
rather than in any premonitions. And the talk of 
the day, as Mackenzie relates it, had to do almost 
entirely with that powerful personality of the King 
who had so recently ceased to be. 

The King is said to have died instantly; he 
had previously consulted his physician about the 
exact location of the most vulnerable spots. Chris- 
tophe’s temperament was scientific: he would do 
everything efficiently. Even in the matter of sui- 
cide, a Haitian should not bungle his job. And so his 
death had been instantaneous. But the picturesque 
ego of the man refused to leave the scene of its con- 
flicts and its triumphs. 

And in the Cape, Mackenzie found men in- 
cessantly talking of this King; seldom speaking 
of him by name, but as ‘‘The Man’’—‘‘The 
King.” They talked of how he had been in 
the beginning wise and humane, and always ambi- 
tious for Haiti. He’d become immensely rich: he 
owned sugar and coffee plantations; he had a mono- 
poly of the meat supply; and he never paid for 
anything in gold or silver, but in produce. With 
all the extravagance of his expenditures he was really 
frugal; he spent freely only where it was a question 
of the splendor and prestige of Haiti. 

Mackenzie heard much of his cruelty, much of 


302 Black Haiti 


how, with power, he had grown violent. And yet 
over and over his death had been alluded to as ‘‘the 
time of our misfortune’; while many could not 
hear him mentioned without deep emotion. 


TIT 


We too, find the heavy doors ajar, but there is no 
assemblage of staring soldiers or workmen. The 
Citadel has been for a hundred years abandoned. 
Outside on the terrace there stands an old iron 
treasure-chest, rusty and empty. There are orchids 
and vines and shrubs growing from crevices in the 
walls, while enamelling the grimly beautiful sur- 
faces is a brilliant orange lichen. 

We pass through the doors into the vast silent 
loneliness. It is damp and musty after the scented 
sunshine of the terrace, where orange trees are in 
flower. And in the gloom a brick staircase is seen 
to mount. There we leave our beasts and our 
attendants. Something is said about lunch, about 
calling us when it is ready. But what we eat, or 
where, does not matter. We are in Christophe’s 
Citadel about to mount a dim staircase. 

We climb cautiously, for the steps crumble and 
it is dark after the sunny trail. We do not know 
where they lead us for there is no Baedeker of the 
Citadel, and the guide has followed the horseboys. 


Fear 303 


So that at the top of the stairway we come without 
warning upon the gallery of the cannon. 

Modern military men laugh at the futility of 
these cannon. Christophe, they say, not only 
fortified his Citadel just when muzzle-loaders were 
about to become obsolete by the introduction of 
breech-loaders, but they say also that the range of 
his guns was so short that they could not cover any 
appreciable area. And they wonder whether Chris- 
tophe knew this, and whether the fortress was after 
all only a great hoax; designed to trick his subjects 
into believing him invincible. 

But you can’t read Vastey and credit that theory. 
If Christophe had been sufficiently shrewd and ex- 
perienced to realize the futility of his Citadel, it was 
the French and not his own people that he wanted 
to hoodwink. The fear which stalks through Vastey’s 
pages is proof enough. And in London Christophe’s 
representative, Prince Sanders, was telling the Eng- 
lish that the Citadel was the ‘‘bulwark of Haitian in- 
dependence, the safeguard of their liberty.” 

Also too it had been begun in the reign of Dessa- 
lines when there was so much feeling in favor of 
moving the whole population into the hills, away 
from the perils of the coast. Then during most of 
the years of the Citadel’s construction Christophe 
was adored. He used to walk freely about the Cape 
attended by a single page. Not until after the 


304 Black Haiti 


stroke in the church of Limonade did the King 
recognize that he had cause for personal fear. 

He knew that there had been latterly some dis- 
content, chiefly among a few of the mulattoes of the 
Cape who wanted all sorts of privileges and pref- 
erences, and who did not see why they had fought 
France only to be reduced to equality with blacks. 
During the absence of the King in another part of 
the island, some of the mulatto women had gone 
to the Cathedral to pray for his downfall. The 
priest had told, and Christophe had commanded 
their massacre. He had been angry, but he had 
not feared: for he knew that he had never discrimi- 
nated against mulattoes and that many—like 
Vastey—were entirely devoted to him. So long as 
he possessed vigor of body he would never have 
admitted fear of a people whom he had so easily 
dominated. That was to come later; too late to be 
set into the masonry of La Ferrtére. 


The futile cannon of the gallery point mutely 
through embrasures which, in the brick of their 
thick walls, frame three-by-four vistas of Christophe’s 
Haiti: entrancing vistas of far hills with decorative 
foreground studies of branch, or vine or orchid. The 
dumb cannon will never speak, never whistle across 
the plain. ‘They are content to remain cannon 
which, since they came to the Citadel, never defended 





Futile cannon waiting for orders that 
will never come. 


eine 
at 


mee) ys = 





Fear 305 


anything, never justified the effort with which they 
were brought to a mountain-top. The wood of the 
carriages which support them is rotting, and they 
themselves are so grey with dust that you must 
brush them off if you would read the fine irony of 
the mottoes engraved above the dates of their 
casting. 

‘‘El Sabio’’—The Wise One—that was cast in 
Barcelona at a time when no one would have be- 
lieved in a French Revolution. ‘‘Le Remarkable”’ 
and ‘‘Honz soit gui mal y pense’’ were both done in 
Paris when Haiti’s sugar and indigo crops were 
pouring gold into the gay capital. 

From the gallery of the cannon we mount by 
moss-grown stairs to a second gallery where we pass 
from vaulted chamber to vaulted chamber; one 
separated from another by open arches. Our foot- 
steps echo in the quiet, our voices come back muffled 
and unnatural. Terrified bats dart squeaking out of 
the shadows. Somewhere water drips and green 
fungus grows on the supporting brick columns. We 
stumble over an old flint-lock and avoid piles of 
cannon balls. Occasionally the walls show where 
the hopeful have excavated in search of buried 
treasure. Through air-shafts we look into dungeons. 
We stand in empty embrasures whose cannon never 
completed their journey up the mountain. Standing 
there, we realize height, our eyes on a level with the 


306 ~ Black Haiti 


tree-tops. Below, a russet-plumaged hawk is sus. 
pended as on invisible wires above the valley. 

We climb again and this time we come out upon 
the flat roof of the fortress walls; out upon a breath- 
less height and a breathless view; where horizons 
are wide and valleys precipitously deep. The West 
Indies Pilot had said something about Haiti’s being 
the highest point in a range of submerged mountains 
whose summits are the islands of the Antilles; some- 
thing also about the vast depth of the passage be- 
tween Haiti and Porto Rico. So there on the 
Citadel I remembered that the ocean floor of Brown- 
son Deep was as far below us as is sea level from the 
glittering pointed peak of Mount Everest. 

We had climbed to a breathless view. 


Pacing thus high on the broad flat roof of the 
Citadel is not like pacing a roof, it is like flying. The 
mountain drops so steeply away from the walls to 
the depth of the distant valleys, and all is as seen 
from an airplane. There is the same effect of shadows 
on the land, of rising mountains and depressed 
valleys. But there is no accompanying throb of 
engines and no roar of exhaust. The landscape is 
stationary; horizons do not change, bays do not 
fuse into forests, nor forests into cliffs, as from a 
moving airplane. 

On the top of the Citadel walls we soar motionless, 


— 
a sles 


Fear 307 


like the hawk suspended over the valley. We seem 
to hover as though we would pause to identify the 
back-drops of the great scenes. 

The Atlantic foaming along the northern coast lies 
tranquil in the balloon-shaped bays of Acul and of 
Cape Haiti. 

Columbus anchored in that bay of Acul, and like 
all his harbors, it was the best in the world; ‘‘capa- 
cious enough to hold the ships of Christendom.” 
For the Great Navigator was an adept at propa- 
ganda. He had written of how delighted he knew 
that his sovereigns would be at the respect and 
honor paid him. Now here was still another example 
of that honor: the inhabitants having come down to 
the shores of Acul in such numbers that they covered 
the beach. ‘‘No one ever met people of such liberal 
and generous dispositions . . . running here and 
there with offerings, making a thousand civilities.”’ 

Beyond Acul, across the water, the long island of 
Tortuga appears low on the horizon. On Tortuga 
the buccaneers had grown so strong that they dared 
to come over and take possession of Haiti; wild 
fellows who had no scruples about mingling their 
blood with that of Africans imported to replace the 
exterminated inhabitants, who had made so many 
civilities and paid so much honor. 

Further to the east, on that same coast, the town 
of the Cape appears like a crescent of roofs on the 


308 Black Haiti 


shore of its own blue balloon of a bay, in which 
Napoleon’s fleet once let down anchor chains. From 
the top of the Citadel the town and the harbor seem 
as distant as their memories. 

East, at the end of the plain, there rise seven 
ranges of hills, each with a distinctive and lovely 
outline. It was to the hills that Mackandal had 
escaped, and on some forested slope that Toussaint 
had joined the delegates who drank the ‘‘oath of 
blood,” while a negro priestess chanted sacred 
Voodoo songs of old Africa. 

To the south, from our high perch on the fortress, 
stretch the trails to Dondon where poor Ogé’s 
mother had the coffee plantation, and to Grande 
Riviére where some powerful negress had given 
birth to the Emperor Dessalines. 

In the deep valleys at our feet, and on the hill- 
sides are patches of cultivation, with at far inter- 
vals some lonely cluster of two or three peaked huts. 
Smoke circles up from new fields being cleared, and 
on still air the song of the workers drifts to the 
summit of Le Bonnet a L’Evéque. It is a thoughtful 
pastoral song, more dreamy than the emphatic 
rhythm with which in all the coast towns gangs of 
men load barges with coffee and cotton for the out- 
going ships. 

The workers sing in the fields, and against the 
black tide of their recurrent lives the spectacular 


Fear 309 


crises stand out. Peasants have sung and toiled in 
Haiti, danced and sung and drummed, sorrowed 
and wailed, while the great figures have moved 
passionately through their parts. And being black, 
the drama has been lyric. 

In the perspective of height and distance the past 
links bays and towns and hills in a chain of events; 
the sum of which is expressed in the Citadel itself. 
And all is seen in the translucent tranquillity; that 
tranquillity which at sunset quivers over the savanna 
of Diane, in what used to be bandit territory. It is 
the transient tranquillity of paternalism: an interlude 
in which certain conclusions come into focus. 

Little by little facts have been sweeping the mind 
clear of accumulated misinformation. Haitians have 
shown themselves, not as impossible savages nor 
entirely righteous martyrs, but as a nation having, 
like ourselves, a devilishly hard time putting into 
practice the democratic ideas which are at once our 
hope and our despair. Similarly the American 
Occupation is not made up of brutes nor of the all- 
wise. Neither is Haiti unanimous in opposition to 
it. On the contrary there is as strong a party of 
Support as there is of Opposition. It may be 
argued that the Support is composed of the ‘‘Ins,”’ 
who are naturally swayed by self-interest; but that 
may work the other way, since you can just as well 
reason that the Opposition is made up of ‘‘Outs.”’ 


310 Black Haiti 


And neither statement would be wholly true, fot 
there are men of honest conviction in both parties. 

Generalizations about Haiti are even more specious 
than about other countries. And when it comes 
to praise or censure for the achievements or the 
blunders since 1915, it should always be remembered 
that responsibility must be shared by the Occupation 
and the existing Haitian Government. While, as 
everywhere else, the energetic Opposition has insti- 
gated the correction of abuses and mistakes. 

But the question is larger than the concrete case 
of Haitian affairs and an Advisory Occupation. It 
is the world-question of whether European-American 
civilization has justified itself; whether we have not 
created a burden of material desires too heavy for 
human endurance; whether, except for sanitation 
and medical science, we have much to offer in the 
way of happiness. 

From the high walls of Christophe’s Citadel, with 
spread out about you the tranquil Haitian scene, 
all this may any day be pondered. 


Then from the courtyard within the fortress, there 
is Martel, calling us to lunch. And we go down 
through the clammy dingy galleries to the rotunda 
of the King’s audience chamber, where fire blazes 
in the old disused chimney and where the fragrance 
of Haitian coffee and the aroma of spluttering 


Fear 311 


bacon fill the dead room with the pungent essence 
of life. 

Our white friends had told us that it would be 
impossible to persuade Haitians of the serving class 
to remain a night at the Citadel. And they had 
advised taking a couple of Marines to look after 
the animals. But a Marine had confided to me that 
moonlight on the Citadel always set him to dreaming 
of the pretty girls at home. And sentimentality 
about pretty girls at home was distinctly out 
of the picture. The Citadel should be seen with 
Haitians; entertaining as a Marine may otherwise 
be. 

We had been told that it would be impossible. 
And yet here was a fat Haitian woman—in an 
ample white cotton dress, coral necklace, red ban- 
danna turban and gilt ear-rings—frying our bacon 
in the audience chamber of a King. Here was Martel 
setting forth lunch on a box of photographic supplies 
for a table, with our saddles as chairs. And there was 
Josef piling logs on the fire, while a horseboy was 
bringing in water from one of Christophe’s cisterns. 
All were Haitians and all had agreed to remain four 
days; for that space we were to live together at the 
Citadel. 

And because of the loneliness, because of the 
possibility of the ghost of Christophe, the Haitians 
who lived those four days with us dropped all 


312 Black Haiti 


restraint; no longer making us feel set apart as 
whites or even as employers. 

Madame fed us when and what she pleased, and 
Martel and Josef were our constant companions in 
exploring the fortress or in idling on the roof of its 
walls. Together we were driven in or out by the 
many changes of weather which visited the Citadel. 

Sometimes heavy pearl-colored cloud flowed 
through the doors and loop-holes. And then we 
would huddle with teary eyes over smoky fires. 
Sometimes rain pattered on the vine-draped shrubs 
in the courtyard, and then we investigated dungeons, 
watched the water trickle into the cisterns, and 
discovered the powder magazine where from the 
black heaps of powder the staves of the barrels in 
which it was once stored stand up, stark, like the 
ribs of some fossil creature, ages dead. But the 
hours when brilliant sunshine filtered through to the 
damp chill chambers, we spent in the beauty and 
peace of the fortress roof. While at night in the echo- 
ing galleries, we often crept carefully by the light of 
an electric pocket flash, or climbed again to the roof 
where the moon seemed hung low, on purpose to 
show how glamorous the Citadel may be; how 
majestic in mass, how interesting in variety of angle, 
how lonely and high, how full of mystery as the 
night of shadows. 

Then groping from gallery to gallery, we would 


Fear 313 


cross the courtyard to the King’s apartments, and 
there each would lie down to sleep beside his own 
private fire, while in the vaulted ceilings bats 
circled and complained, and outside the door frogs 
piped in the broken crescendo rhythm of education 
as you hear it under the tree at the priest’s house 
in Milot. 

All night the wind sweeps about the fortress, 
rushing round its corners, through loop-holes and 
doors, through the high grasses and the tree-tops. 
It does not moan, but sweeps largely and magnifi- 
cently. And if there is a ghost of Christophe at 
the Citadel it is the strong proud sweeping wind 
which never condescends to moan. 


LAUGHTER 


JOSEF is happy and Martel is not. 

Martel is a young man belonging to the caste of 
the shod. His shoes are tan and cost a month’s pay. 
Of course they have led to socks, to a white suit, 
and a shirt; whose color happens to be khaki—very 
much the color, by the way, of Martel himself. 

This costume has set for its owner standards 
difficult of accomplishment. If your ambitions are 
primitive, life in Haiti is easy, but once you become 
an addict to fashion, once you have cravings for the 
civilized, then things are not so simple. Oppor- 
tunities are few for one who would be provided with 
shoes, and with the extravagances to which they so 
inevitably lead. Also one must work in order to 
earn on any such grandiose scale as that. 

And a great indolence flows in the mulatto veins 
of Martel. Perhaps his standards of dress have 
left little money for vitamins and proteids and 
fats. Or possibly Science would disclose some germ 
or parasite explanation. The indolence however is 
beyond argument, and side by side with the listless- 
ness there smoulders pride. 

314 


Laughter 315 


Martel was to have been our cook, as well as our 
interpreter and general ‘‘boy.’’ He had so engaged 
himself. But long before we reached the door of the 
priest’s house in Milot, I knew that the elegant 
Martel, lounging in the back of the motor and 
smoking innumerable cigarettes, would be no cook. 
Also by the time we arrived at Milot it was apparent 
that our Creole was almost as good as his French. 
So the hope of Martel as interpreter had to be re- 
linquished. But he might perhaps be useful in 
other ways. He might qualify as general boy; 
helping with the packing and the photography. But 
Martel would invariably pass on his duties to some 
one else. Give him a direction, he would receive it 
amiably and at once relay it to Josef: looking on 
with bored and melancholy air while Josef executed 
it. 

Martel is faintly interested in teaching me Creole 
proverbs, of which there are something like eleven 
hundred in circulation in Haiti. But those of Martei’s 
significant selection deal always with food, women 
and clothes. 

‘‘An empty sack cannot stand up.” 

“Tf you’re not rich you'll never get a beautiful 
girl, while if you’re without money you'll get no girl 
at all’ 

“He who is well dressed never slips; but he who 
wears rags falls.”’ 


316 Black Haiti 


Martel is languidly diverted by reciting to me 
his favorite proverbs, but the interest is never suffi- 
cient to banish the habitual discontent from his 
face. 


Josef is a black youth—completely black. In his 
case a Moreau de St. Méry would not have to bother 
about fractional percentages. He is black and he 
is ragged. Martel’s white suit has been daily losing 
its splendor, for he has brought no change of gar- 
ments and the Citadel has not been dusted for a 
hundred years; but Josef’s rags cannot look worse 
than they did on the first day, and his bare feet are 
the color that does not show wear. There are tooth- 
less gaps in his merry grin, but neither rags nor 
missing teeth disturb him. In moments of leisure 
he gazes complacently into the small mirror which 
is drawn flashing from a pocket in the rags. 

Martel has the delusion that he can read and 
write, but Josef makes no pretense to accomplish- 
ments. Yet an idea dawns slowly in the listless 
brain of Martel, whereas Josef is quick, curious, 
eager. He is deft and careful and never needs to 
have anything explained more than once. No detail 
escapes his inquisitive eyes. Living is a joke at 
which he chuckles all day. 

In a moment when I have to share enthusiasm 
with some one, I ask Martel what he thinks of the 





Orange lichens enamel the grimly beautiful 
surface of the fortress walls. 


: 7 ") , ” 
a + yan Pa Ay We Lbe ps 
oa on \e 4 vs a Pi i> iy * py 
= Pre 4 
vr 


mary 


‘ ~ ‘ > > nt OTe 
mh igfi vial os vi 


ee : nie AF ae i 
MA i tile kee 
Nat aT eke Gi 


ria 
ST i= 
~ Ce =~? Ny 7 
he ae on 
ae Ps ge dp + = ve 
: — & 


Si 


ra vi 
ree ry ‘ 





Laughter 317 


Citadel, and the reply is that he thinks nothing 
—absolutely nothing. 

But is it not—I grope for an easily comprehended 
and obvious word—is it not at least enormous? 

“Oh, yes, it is enormous.” In a tone which in- 
sinuates, Well, what of that? 

To Josef, however, the Citadel is amusing. He 
loves, when on the roof, to throw stray bricks down 
the air-shafts, and to listen to their echoing fall 
from the top of the fortress to its subterranean 
dungeons. He laughs in an excited glee entirely 
out of proportion to the incident, and he gives a 
perfect imitation of the descending reverberation. 
For Josef has the African gift and the African de- 
light in imitating sound. He is a cat or a dog, a 
shrill bat, the horn of the motor which brought us 
to Milot, or he is the drum to whose beat men are 
clearing the fields in the valley, but oftenest he is 
the bricks which he throws down the airshafts of 
the Citadel; and the game is just as much fun the 
last time as the first. 

He hasn’t an idea that the Citadel has transmuted 
into beauty the slaves’ fear of slavery. His laugh 
is the pure distillation of joy, without inhibitions 
or affectations or reserves. It is the spontaneous 
expression of that happiness which is for him so 
cheap. Often the two boys lie side by side in the 
sun, among the grasses and the tiny box-wood plants 


318 Black Haiti 


and the fuchias which grow on the fortress roof. 
They lie peering over the sheer drop of the lovely 
orange-lichened wall, and Josef’s voice, sunk to 
a low engaging key, talks in a manner so bewitching 
that Martel, forgetting his shoes and his sophisticated 
anxieties, joins in the laughter which bubbles from 
the depths of Josef. 

And only the black boy, Josef, can make Martel 
laugh like that. 


AUTHORITIES CONSULTED 


ARDOUIN, BEAUBRUN. 
Etudes sur l’histoire d’Haiti. Paris; 1853-1855. 
AUBIN, EUGENE. 
En Haiti. Planteurs d’autrefois. Paris; 1910. 
BEARD, J. R. 
Life of Toussaint l’Ouverture. With Mémoir written 
by Himself. London; 1853. 
BELLEGARDE, WINDSOR. 
Petite Histoire d’Haiti (between the years of 1492- 
1915). Haiti; 1924. / 
Manuel d’Instruction Civique et Morale. Haiti; 
1925. 
BIGELOW, JOHN. 
The Wit and Wisdom of the Haitians. New York; 
1877. 
CHAUVET, HENRI. 
A Travers la République d’Haiti. Paris; 1894. 
CHENET, EDMOND. 
Proverbs Haitiens. Haiti. 
COLUMBUS, CHRISTOPHER. 
Journal of First Voyage to America. New York; 1924. 
CONGRES UNIVERSAL DES RACEs. 
Tenu a Londres du 26 au 29 Juillet 1911. 
La République d’Haiti et Les Races Africaines en 
General. Haiti; 1912. 
319 


320 Authorities Consulted 


CONSTITUTION DE LA REPUBLIQUE D’HAITI. 
Haiti; 1918. 
DEsSCcOURTILS, M. E. 

Voyage d’un Naturaliste au Continent de l’Amérique 
Septional, 4 Saint Jago de Cuba et a Saint Domingue. 
Paris; 1809. 

DoRSAINVIL, DR. J. C. 

Une Explication Philologique du Vod&. Haiti; 1924. 
DURAND, OSWALD. 

La Derniére Etape. Haiti; 1906. 
EDWARDS, BRYAN. 

An Historical Survey of the French Colony of Santo 
Domingo. London; 1797. 


FOREIGN PoLicy ASSOCIATION. 
The Seizure of Haiti by the United States. New 
York; 1922. 


HARVEY, W. W. 
Sketches of Haiti. From the Expulsion of the French 
to the Death of Christophe. London; 1827. 


HASSALL (Miss). 
Secret History; or the Horrors of Santo Domingo. 
In a series of letters written by a lady at Cape 
Francois to Colonel Burr. Philadelphia; 1808. 


HAZARD, SAMUEL. 
Santo Domingo Past and Present with a Glance at 
Haiti. New York; 1873. 


HERAND, EDMOND. 
Mélanges, Politiques et Litteraires. Haiti; 1896. 


HIBBERT, FERNAND. 
Masques et Visages. Haiti; 1910. 


INMAN, S. S. 
Through Santo Domingo and Haiti. New York; 1920. 


Authorities Consulted 321 


JANVIER, LOUIS-JOSEPH. 

La République d’Haiti et ses Visiteurs (1840-1882). 

Paris; 1883. 
KELSEY, CARL, PH.D. 

The American Intervention in Haiti and the Domini- 
can Republic. The Annals of the American 
Academy of Political and Social Science. Phila- 
delphia; 1921. 

KNAPP, REAR ADMIRAL H. S. 

Haiti: Reports and Inquiries Regarding Conditions, 
and the Conduct of Marines. Appendix C. Report 
of the Secretary of the Navy. Washington; 1920. 


KUSER, JOHN DRYDEN. 
Haiti. Boston; 1921. 


LAFOREST, ANTOINE. 
Croquis Haitiens. Haiti; 1906. 


LEGER, J. H. 
Haiti, Son Histoire et ses Détracteurs. New York; 
1907. 
LHERISSON, JUSTIN. 
La Famille des Pitite-Caille. Haiti; 1905. 


LOUVERTURE, ISAAC. 
Mémoirs et Notes sur lExpédition des Frangais 
sous le Consulat de Bonaparte, et sur la vie de 
Toussaint Louverture. (See Métral.) Paris; 1825. 


LOUVERTURE, TOUSSAINT. 
Mémoir written by Himself. (See Redpath and 
Beard.) 


MACKENZIE, CHARLES, F. R. S., F. L. S. 
Notes on Haiti. London; 1830. 


MACKENZIE, JEAN. 
African Clearings. Boston; 1924. 


322 Authorities Consulted 


Mapiou, THomas, FIs. 
Histoire d’Haiti. Haiti; 1847. 
MAGLOIRE, AUGUSTE. 
Etude sur le Tempérament Haitien. Haiti; 1908. 
L’Erreur Révolutionaire et Notre Etat Social. Haiti; 
1909. 
MarAN, RENE. 
Batouala. Paris; 1921. 
MARCELIN, FREDERIC. 
Questions Haitiennes. Haiti; 1891. 
Choses Haitiennes. Haiti; 1896. 
MARTINEAU, HARRIET. 
Appendix to her novel, ‘‘The Hour and the Man.” 
1841. 
MAURICE, PAUL. 
Politique d’Organization et de Progrés ou Apercu du 
Programme du Président Borno. Haiti; 1925. 


METRAL, A. M. T. 

Histoire de l’Expédition des Francais a St. Domingue, 
Suivi de Mémoirs et Notes de Isaac Louverture. 
Paris; 1825. 

MISCELLANEOUS AUTHORS. 

Morceaux Choisis. Haiti; 1906. 

MorAVIA, CHARLES. 

La Créte-a-Pierrot. Haiti; 1908. 

THE Nation. (New York). Various articles and edi- 

torials since 1915. 

Nau, EMILE. 
Histoire des Caciques d’Haiti. Paris; 1894. 


NEMOURS, COLONEL. 
Histoire Militaire de la Guerre d’Indépendence de 
Saint-Domingue. 1925. 


Authorities Consulted 323 


PAN-AMERICAN UNION. 
Publications up to date. 


PARK, MUNGO. 
The Travels of Mungo Park. London; 1799. 


POUPLARD, J. 
Notice sur l’Histoire de l’Eglise de Port-au-Prince. 
Haiti; 1905. 


Powys, LLEWELYN. 
Black Laughter. New York; 1924. 
Ebony and Ivory. New York; 1925. 


PRICE, HANNIBAL. 
De la Réhabilitation de la Race Noire par la Ré- 
publique d’Haiti. Haiti; 1900. 


PrRIcE-Mars, Dr. 
Unpublished paper on Le Phénomene et la sentiment 
réligieux chez les négres de St. Domingue. 


PRITCHARD, H. V. H. 
Where Black Rules White. London; 1910. 


RAINSFORD, MARCUS. 
An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Haiti. 
London; 1805. 


REDPATH, JAMES. 
A Guide to Haiti. Boston; 1861. 
Toussaint l’Ouverture; A Biography and Autobio- 
graphy. Boston; 1863. 


ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION. 
International Health Board. Publications concerning 
Hookworm and Malaria in Tropical Countries. 


ST. JOHN, SPENSER. 
Haiti, or The Black Republic. New York; 1889. 


324 Authorities Consulted 


St. Méry, Moreau DE, M. L. E. 
Déscription Topographique, Physique, Civile, Poli- 
tique et Historique de la Partie Frangaise de 1’Isle 
de Saint Domingue. Philadelphia; 1779. 


SANDERS, PRINCE. 

Haytian Papers. A Collection of the Very Interesting 
Proclamations and other Documents; together with 
some account of the Rise, Progress and Present 
State of the Kingdom of Haiti, with a Preface by 
Prince Sanders, Agent for the Haytian Government. 
London; 1816. 


SCHOENRICH, OTTO. 
Santo Domingo. A Country with a Future. New 
York; 1918. 


SECRETARY OF THE NAVY REPORT. 
Washington; 1920. 
STEVENS, EDWARD. 


Letters of Toussaint Louverture and Edward Stevens. 
American Historical Review. V. 16. 


STODDARD, LOTHROP. 
The French Revolution in Santo Domingo. New 
York; 1914. 
STOKES, Dr. JoHN H. 
Today’s World Problem in Disease Prevention. 
Issued by United States Public Health Service, 
Treasury Department. Washington, D. C. Ig19. 


TRESOR DES CHANSONS. 
Haiti; 1921. 
L’UNION PATRIOTIQUE. 
Bulletin Mensuel. Haiti; 1921. 
La Mission Hudicourt 4 Washington et 4 Lima. Haiti; 
1925. 


Authorities Consulted 325 


UNITED STATES SENATE. | 
67th Congress. 2nd Session. Report No. 794. In- 
quiry into Occupation and Administration of Haiti 
and the Dominican Republic. Washington; 1922. 


VASTEY, BARON DE. | 

Le Systéme Colonial Dévoilé. Imprimé au Cap- 
Henri. Haiti; 1814. 

Réflexions Politiques sur Quelques Ouvrages et Jour- 
neaux Francais concernant Hayti. De l’imprimerie 
Royale a Sans Souci. Haiti; 1817. 

Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazéres, ex-Colon Fran- 
cais, sur les Noirs et les Blancs, la Civilization de 1’- 
Afrique, le Royaume d’Hayti. Cap-Henri. Haiti; 
1816. 

WARNER, IRENE. 
Voodooism on the West Coast of Africa. Paris; 1914. 
WIMPFFEN, BARON DE. 

A Voyage to Santo Domingo in the years 1786, 1789 

and1790. Translated by J. Wright. London; 1797. 


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